


l’Enfer C’est les Autres (Hell is other people)

by Cthulhtist



Category: Friday the 13th Series (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Coping, Dead Teenagers, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Gun Violence, Insecurity, Jason Voorhees is a tragic figure, LOTS of violence, Lots of dead people, Other, Pain, Past Violence, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Sexual Violence, Suicidal Thoughts, Trigger Warnings, not much fluff, possible necrophilia, tags will be updated as this progresses, tentative friendship, this cannot have a happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:08:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23421463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cthulhtist/pseuds/Cthulhtist
Summary: A chronically ill, self-destructive young woman who cannot cope with everything she has been through and will have to go through until she dies, recalls having heard about a beautiful spot up in the wilds of rural Wessex County, NJ haunted by a vengeful murderer who will not stay dead and who kills anyone who goes there.It seems like the perfect place for her to go.Jason Voorhees does not like trespassers.(Major revision complete!)
Relationships: Jason Voorhees/Camp Crystal Lake, Jason Voorhees/Original Character(s), Jason Voorhees/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 30





	1. Some Girls Wander By Mistake

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (“No Exit”) -  
> I believe Jason would agree with the sentiment that Hell is other people.
> 
> The Cthulhtist does not own anything of the Friday the 13th series - if she did, Part VIII would have taken place at Camp Crystal Lake and Part IX .......... would have featured far more Jason and absolutely would NOT have featured demons, extended family, or the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, despite her love for the Evil Dead trilogy. Jayne is the Cthulhtist’s creation, based upon a girl she knows very well - with her full and enthusiastic permission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just know ... this is going to be pretty full of references to past self-harm and suicidal ideation, as well as references to pretty horrific sexual violence. If reading about these subjects would upset you, please read something else. Basically, trigger warnings out the wazoo, and I’d not like to see anyone harmed by this.

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter I: Some Girls Wander By Mistake**

It was as good a place as any she had seen to die, Jayne mused, gazing out through the dingy, bug-bespattered windshield at the dark woods streaking by, overgrown and looming ever closer over the narrow, deeply-pitted dirt road. She felt a momentary stab of pity for her poor old car’s abused suspension, and she gently patted the well-worn gearshift knob.

“Don’t worry, Rodney,” she murmured to the car in a soft, slightly raspy monotone, a habit she had developed over thousands of miles alone driving upon the highways of the eastern United States with nobody for company besides the twice-wrecked ‘92 Honda Civic hatchback with its leaking windows, the unreliable stereo system she had installed in it herself, and the pain that was so ever-present as to feel like a separate albeit most unwelcome entity. “We’re almost there. Just another mile or so ...”

She had tossed the roadmap into the backseat once she reached the turnoff, preferring not to be distracted from the scenery she had come so far to see, so she was not entirely certain about the reassurances she gave the car, but the distance ahead did not matter to her. With a delicate, almost skeletal, twisted and lumpy pale little hand, tinged faintly blue by the visible highway map of veins and speckled with tiny scabs and white and pink scars of various ages, she reached into the cup holder and grabbed the already-uncapped bottle of pills, raising it to her mouth and quickly, expertly dumping two tablets into her mouth, then she dry-swallowed them before slamming it back down beside her knee. Suddenly and wholly unexpectedly, her vision went blurry and her green-flecked amber eyes burned as they filled with tears of helpless frustration, and she heard a quiet, hoarse little bark that she recognised as her bitter, humourless laugh. She hated the pills. She hated the scars dotting the backs of her crooked, subtly misshapen hands and the insides of her elbows left by more i.v.s than she cared to remember. She hated having to schedule her life around the many pills she had to take and regular visits with a half-dozen specialists, but she hated it even more when that familiar, thoroughly-despised monotony was interrupted by the unpredictable hospitalisations that lasted anywhere from a few days to several weeks at a time. One such period, comparatively short at a mere twelve days, had just ended when she decided it was finally time to make this trip.

Jayne eased up on the accelerator, dropping the speed below the cautious fifteen miles per hour she had been travelling down the unfamiliar and long-unmaintained dirt road so that Rodney or a tree would not fall victim to her impaired vision. They had made it this far - and they  _ were _ almost there. It sounds trite, but she could feel it in her bones, similar to how she could feel approaching storms in her swollen digits and the wrist she had broken in a rock climbing accident the summer before she started college that had never properly healed even years later. Her journey was so close to being complete, finally, so close to the end, and she would finally be able to relax. She was profoundly exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but knowing how close she was to rest was a relief.

Too many years had passed since she had been able to let down her guard and relax. She did not know why it was so, but she often suspected that there was a target affixed to her back that was only visible to the users and abusers of the world who seemingly viewed Jayne with her visibly obvious fragility and shyly gentle mannerisms as an ideal victim for bullying and worse. On top of that, her own body was actively trying to kill her, although it had failed in that endeavour thus far thanks to the intervention of medical professionals and some obnoxious spark within her that just refused to be snuffed out. Jayne hated that spark. She could not think of any better way than that to describe the autoimmune disease that had been ravaging her body, inside and out, since she was a toddler, taking its time, slowly yet progressively damaging and destroying anything and everything she might have become. Now that she was a woman in her mid-twenties, she had been able to arrange her life so that she had only minimal contact with the general public she dreaded facing, at least - down to working as a copy editor from her home in the Deep South for two of the large New York publishing houses as well as occasionally doing contract work for a few others including one overseas and paying the teenage daughter of her downstairs neighbours to bring her the mail from the box every day after school and even to buy groceries for her once a week. The internet made it remarkably easy to live comfortably as a recluse.

In fact, if not for the constant monitoring her health required, Jayne suspected that she probably would never even have to leave her home, getting by with just her phone, email, and Skype - that she would not have to converse with  _ anyone _ in person. She found herself wishing she could live as a shut-in with only her books and her cat for company,  _ especially _ every time she had to deal with introducing herself and trying to explain her history to yet another new doctor. It seemed like they inevitably commented upon what a good attitude she had about her condition and her prognosis, how positive and inspiring she was. Sometimes that made her want to laugh. More often, it felt like a punch to the gut from a grown man, a sensation that had become intimately well-known to her ten days before her seventeenth birthday. 

She knew what that supposed positivity really was, though - she had simply been raised to be a people-pleaser, and her mother had done such a good job at this indoctrination that by the time she started school, Jayne did not have to be told that nobody wanted to hear her complaints or about her true feelings, and that even if someone asked, she should say something positive. She knew better than to talk about the excruciating pain burning day and night in her inflamed, arthritic joints, or the primal terror she felt when the inflammation would strike her lungs, stealing her breath, smothering her. What good would it even do to describe to them or anyone else how it feels to have your immune system, that marvellous biological machine meant to  _ protect _ you from harm, turn against you, torture you, and try to kill you, she had wondered countless times. And what about how the medications prescribed to treat the actual underlying condition - not just the symptoms like inflammation, nausea, rashes, supraventricular tachycardia, skin lesions, perpetually dilated pupils, photosensitivity, and pain ...  _ so damned much pain _ … but the autoimmune disease  _ itself _ \- work by suppressing your sadistic, murderous immune system, leaving you vulnerable, defenceless against any and every imaginable infection, which inevitably would spread? Who besides those who lived with it themselves even could relate to that? 

Her experiences certainly isolated her; even more, though, Jayne found herself envious of others. Sometimes, merely watching people do the things that she had loved to do, engaging in activities like dancing, roller skating, playing guitar, rock climbing, and so many other small pleasures that were now difficult if not impossible for her, was just as painful as the arthritis and colitis. Sometimes, she even hated everyone else. However, as she had always been told that envy, much less burning hatred, is a sin, that jealousy and hatred simply increased her misery, isolation, and self-loathing, even though she had long abandoned the faith in which her well-meaning parents had raised her. 

_ No benevolent god would have created her much less allowed her existence to go on for so long. _

_ If her  _ own body _ wanted her dead, how awful must she be? _

The psoriasis that was diagnosed before her fourth birthday did not affect her much. It was easy enough for Jayne to wear long-sleeved tops to hide the scaly patches upon her elbows, and tights were sufficient to mask the ugly plaques upon her thighs from curious eyes, even in ballet class. She endured some teasing for wearing long-sleeved tops and jeans or leggings underneath her skirts and dresses even at the height of summer in the sweltering, humid oven that is the area just above the mouth of the Mississippi River, but it was no worse than the teasing for her short stature, boyish figure, breaking the grade curve, or her preference for the company of books over that of her peers. 

That knowledge of how to hide marred flesh also served Jayne well in middle school when she needed to hide the designs she had begun to carve into her tummy and chest with an x-acto knife in vain attempts to drain out some of the misery and self-loathing that was building up and threatening to explode from within her but that she could not allow herself to express. The two smallest toes of her left foot swelled up like a near-completely immobile pair of tiny pink sausages shortly before her tenth birthday, and the occasional tummy aches that haunt all children became more instead of less frequent with time. She stopped gaining weight, no matter how much she ate, and her naturally slender frame started to look outright emaciated as she slowly continued to grow taller and increasingly pale as her skin became more and more sensitive to sunlight and she learnt to avoid spending time exposed thereto with any skin exposed. A few months later, she had her breath stolen from her by inflammation-induced bronchial spasms for the first time. She did not know it then, but looking back, Jayne viewed that terrifying day as the beginning of the end - and as the last time she had felt welcome in her own body. By the time she was twelve years old, the arthritis had begun to spread, engulfing and warping her lower extremity from all five toes upon er left foot up into her ankle and even touching her knee, and she was scratching a series of shallow lines into the skin along the prominent lines of her rib cage with her x-acto knife on an almost daily basis.

Jealousy of the other children her age and the constant dull aching progressing up the left side of her body envenomed her mind, poisoning even the most pleasant of her thoughts, and her only escapes were into dancing, hiking, and the fantastic novels that she read constantly. She even resorted to hiding her book underneath her desk so that she could read during classes and carrying it with her into the lavatory. While dancing and hiking became increasingly onerous with each year’s passing, reading remained a great pleasure as well as a distraction. Jayne often wished she could be left alone completely with her books and music. Even conversations about subjects that fascinated her with the few classmates who seemed to want her company and invited her over to hang out, watch movies, or for sleepovers, were draining for her. She did not trust them and always feared they were just trying to get her to let her guard down, leaving her open to teasing, tricks, and cruel pranks, despite that fact that her classmates’ outright, overt cruelty had dissipated by junior high when less calmly resigned and therefore more amusing victims emerged to capture the interest of the bullies. 

By middle school, depression’s hand had firmly and seemingly irrevocably taken hold of the tiller of her life, guiding her ever-deeper into misery. She knew that she was worthless and bad, that she was no good and of no use to anyone and had nothing positive to offer - why else would her body be so hellbent upon torturing her, ensuring that her pain was so constant that she could not even  _ remember _ how it felt to have a single day without stomach-churning pain, and hastening her onward at breakneck speed toward an early death from one or more of the unpleasant effects of her condition or the treatments therefor? She simply had been born wrong, cursed by genetics, and for that she needed to be erased from this existence. However, before her stain vanished from the mortal coil, whatever malign forces that guide the universe apparently commanded that she had to suffer ... she suspected that she probably even deserved it for whatever reason that might be - Jayne could not fathom what it was, but nevertheless she accepted it as valid. The only reason she could come up with which might render her deserving thereof besides merely having been born wrong was her bitterness and jealousy. Otherwise, she was either paying for the (doubtless vile, repugnant, and profoundly awful) sins of another, or she was some sort of experiment, a marionette dangling from strings made of pain, a toy to amuse some sadistic being of power incomprehensible to the human mind that others might call “god” and worship. Neither dish was particularly palatable. 

Jayne did not mean to wallow in her misery or indulge in self-pity. Truly, she did not feel particularly sorry for herself and her rather bleak, brief future, any sympathy directed toward her made her horribly uncomfortable, and she disdained most expressions of empathy she encountered outside of a select few patients she had gotten to know in the clinics and hospitals where she spent too much of her time. She did not pity herself.

She hated herself.

But she had been trained so well - to make eye contact and smile prettily when approached, to look for and compliment something unique about anyone who engaged her in conversation, to laugh quietly or feign a moué of sympathy where appropriate, and most of all,  **NEVER** to let on that she was in pain, distracted, disgusted, or bored. Thus, nobody ever knew what was really going on inside of her behind the gracious mask of old southern civility. Her classmates and later her coworkers thought the skinny, pallid little girl with big hazel eyes and too much thick, wavy, dark blonde hair which glittered bright with copper in certain lights - so much hair that it overwhelmed her slight figure - was extremely shy and perhaps a little peculiar, a little too quiet, but so patient, considerate, polite, and helpful that they happily looked past her eccentricities. Mothers even encouraged their sons to date her, but she inevitably turned down the small number of those who acquiesced and asked her out, albeit doing it so gently that it was hard to hold a grudge against her - despite her suspicion that nobody with good intentions would ever stoop so low as to settle for wanting to be with her. The nurses and doctors thought she was impressively stoic just because she smiled and thanked them when they drew her blood, tested her ever-decreasing range of motion, set up the i.v. for her monthly infusion, or told her that the infection that had already spread from her bladder to both kidneys over the three previous weeks was not responding at all to any of the antibiotics they tried, did she have anyone they should call to come visit her, and did she have an advance directive, DNR, and will?

It had felt like being kicked in the stomach while her lungs screamed to reclaim the breath torn from them, but she even thanked the orthopaedist when he told her that she needed to have both of her hips and both of her knees replaced, but that he would not perform the surgery until she was at least 40 years old because the replacements wear out more quickly the younger and more active the patient is ... and that was only assuming she could pass the cardiac function tests required to go under general anaesthesia by then. 

She hid her hopelessness, desolation, and guilt almost as well as she hid her scars and the plaques of thick, angry, flaking skin that showed up at random anywhere on her body - although at least it seemed as if the worse her arthritis became, the clearer her skin somehow became, as if the inner and outward manifestations of her condition were inversely proportional, and by the time the inflammation had worked its way up the right side of her body, the plaques were not even a monthly thing anymore. When she tried to analyse her situation with emotionless logic, she knew that fourteen years should be enough time for her to get her heart in better shape, and that in that amount of time there  _ could _ be a breakthrough in the treatments for autoimmune disorders like hers - possibly a cure might even be discovered. The bare facts were not enough to overcome her dread or the pessimism born from all her experiences that taught her that hope always leads to the disappointment that had birthed it, though. What she saw was was not hope and positive possibilities; instead, she saw fourteen more years of monthly intravenous infusions costing her thousands of dollars each time even with health insurance, the devil knows how many infections and hospitalisations, seventeen pills a day on good days and the complete inability to walk even from the bed to the sink to brush her teeth on the bad days - and the bad days were significantly more prevalent in her experience, and only becoming more so with the passage of time. Fourteen more years of agony to wait ... but the offered anticipation was not fourteen more years until she would be cured; it would be another fourteen years just until they could perform further surgeries on her that  _ might _ reduce her pain and  _ might  _ increase her mobility ... if they did not make them worse. 

_ If she actually even lived that long _ .

That thought - living fourteen more years trapped in her body as it viciously attempted to destroy itself - was almost more than Jayne could bear. That thought was the impetus for her giving her beloved cat to the sweet, helpful family living downstairs, hoping that their kindness to her despite her eccentricities meant that they would treat him at least as well as she did, and it was responsible for her finally loading a few weeks’ worth of supplies and old camping gear left over from trips into the swamps of southern Louisiana and to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina with her late father into the beaten up but reliable Rodney (named thusly as a prayer of sorts that the elderly Civic “not throw a rod...ney” by the tattered remnants of her sense of humour) then setting out for a beautiful but deserted summer camp up north in New Jersey that she had heard about a decade earlier and that had burrowed into her imagination and set up residence therein. That thought was what put her upon the narrow, deeply rutted road slowly being reclaimed by the thick autumn foliage surrounding it that day.

While she swiped at the tears dripping down her cheeks and the stubborn ones clinging to her eyelashes in irritation, her heart suddenly soared when she saw the dilapidated and badly weathered wooden sign arching over the road announcing that she had finally made it to her long-awaited destination. 

**CAMP CRYSTAL LAKE**

With a crooked little half-smile, she told the car, “We made it, Rodney. Now, I just need to find somewhere to put you and set up camp so I don’t have to spend another damned night in this seat.” 

Silently, she added, “Somewhere someone will find you and give you a new home.” 

But even though she thought it, she was not brave enough to express that sentiment aloud, even though her only audience was her vehicle and the other inanimate objects piled up inside it.

**********

The masked killer was surprised to see someone sitting at the end of the rickety old dock. Moving quickly in wraith-like silence despite his remarkably tall and thickly muscular, bulky frame, he approached to examine this unexpected and unwanted intruder into  _ his _ realm, the machete he loosely gripped in a large, gloved hand hanging at his side. Upon the shoreline at the foot of the dock, he stood perfectly still, observing the figure intently. It was a child, he decided, judging by her small stature and the pale, skinny wrists standing out in sharp contrast against the gaping black void of the long sleeves of the T-shirt out of which they jutted. The presence of children in their innocence did not bother him, they did not trigger his need to eradicate trespassers, but children never came to Crystal Lake unaccompanied. The teenagers and adults who were foolish enough to bring children there, on the other hand,  _ they _ were not welcome. In fact, among all of those he had killed or attempted to kill, only one or maybe two were children, and he had never gone out intending to kill a child; however,  _ anyone _ who got between him and his target inevitably wound up dead, and he felt no shame or remorse for the very few innocents who had made the fatal mistake of getting in his way and who thereby came to harm. Maintaining his perfect silence, Jason Voorhees abandoned his disinterested assessment of the little girl sitting upon the dock and went off in search of whatever fools had brought a child to Camp Blood. 

They deserved their fate for such recklessness alone.

A few minutes later, Jason found the car in which they must have come parked in a natural clearing about half a mile past the camp entrance. Despite having little interest in such things, even he could tell that the dusty, dirt-encrusted little green two-door hatchback with its mismatched panels riddled with rust and held together with patches of bondo, cluttered backseat, and a faint stink of mildew emanating from the half-opened windows, had one tyre in the junkyard. As he strode to the other side of the small clearing, he noted that a tarp had been strung up between three trees as a simple yet effective a-line shelter against the elements, and a second tarp had been set down beneath it to form a floor. A small pile of faded old blankets sat on the tarp alongside a lantern, a stack of four thick, dogeared books, and a single pillow. He noted that the camper had already dug a fire pit at a safe distance from the tarp but close enough to provide some defence against the autumn chill and cleared away the fallen leaves surrounding it, leaving the sharp shovel on the ground beside it, and he or she had gathered some kindling and a few larger branches into a pile beside the pit, though none of these was as long as his arm or much thicker than one of his fingers. 

However, none of these details mattered to the masked killer and the simple efficiency of the neat little campsite that had sprung up like a fungus after a rainstorm in his domain failed to impress him, although he grabbed the sharp-bladed shovel for himself, thinking it might prove useful at some future point.

The camp was simply perplexing to him. There was only space for one person to sit in the cluttered, fully-packed little old hatchback, and there was only one pillow and one pile of faded blankets laid out beneath the tarp. Children do not drive - he was sure of this. No matter how much things had changed since he had been alive and a little boy himself,  _ that _ would not have changed. So, what did these discoveries mean? Jason’s was a simple world of cause and effect in which mysteries had no place. Irritation at what he now viewed as a trick burning in his dead but undying gut, he began walking back toward the lake in which he had drowned so many years ago.

He paused at the edge of the tree line and fixed his lopsided hunter’s gaze upon the diminutive figure still sitting at the edge of the dock. The setting sun gilded the curls dangling down the girl’s narrow back in copper and gold that matched the autumn foliage as it floated around her on fingers of breeze, but the beauty of the scene was lost upon him. What that reddish blonde hair did instead was trigger a flash of memory, although it was far longer and wavier than  _ hers  _ had been … that horrible, unforgettable girl named Alice who had killed Mommy and who, in turn, had been the first person he hunted, who had been  _ his  _ first kill. Jason’s stomach lurched and his hands clenched into fists so tightly that he could feel his jagged fingernails digging into his palms through the thick, once-yellow leather of his irrevocably bloodstained gloves. But Alice was long dead, and aside from the similar colour of the girl upon the dock’s hair, he saw no actual resemblance to his mother’s murderer. The entirety of Jason’s intense focus was fixed upon studying this interloper who was trying to trick him. His vision was almost as exceptional as his hearing despite the fact that one of his eyes was set significantly lower in his uneven, asymmetrical face than the other and he was nearly blind in that lower eye, so the distance from which he observed her from behind made little difference. 

The little girl or woman or whatever she might be was sitting up very straight with one skinny leg clad in clinging black leggings folded to the side almost as if she were sitting Indian style, and it appeared that she had rolled the other leg of her leggings up to her knee with the limb below that dangling off the edge of the dock into the clear, cool water. Sitting upon the warped, grey boards beside her were a water bottle, a spiral-bound pad of paper, a smallish green backpack, an intricately carved and well-oiled walking stick, and a pair of black and green jungle boots that looked laughably small to him even knowing the distance between where he stood and the end of the dock. 

Then, he could feel the breeze coming in off the lake picking up, and when the girl reached up with both hands to pull her wild curls back and off of her face, the back of her T-shirt was lifted up, too, revealing almost half an inch of remarkably pale skin and the familiar bulge of a handgun in a holster resting upon her hip. The killer frowned behind his scuffed hockey mask at that unwelcome sight. He knew very well by then that being shot would not kill him or even do him much harm, but it remained one of the more unpleasantly painful experiences for him. However, he learned one more important thing from this - the positioning of her weapon indicated that she likely was left-handed.

The sight of the gun further altered his impression of the intruder, so he decided to move forward toward her or a closer inspection - plus, that way, if she should prove to be a threat (although, oddly, he  _ still  _ had not yet heard the echo of Mommy’s voice speaking to him in his mind, commanding him to kill), he could end her life quickly. Despite his weight, the rotting old wood of the dock failed to squeal or groan its protest when he stepped out onto the span, and the girl did not even turn around when he stopped and stood glaring down at her from barely four feet behind her back. Standing so close, he could see the skulls and runes that meant nothing to him carved into the top and midway down the shaft of the walking stick, but it was the matte black hilt of a long hunting knife in a scuffed, worn, black leather sheath tied to her bent left thigh, camouflaged though visible from that close against the clinging black fabric, that caught his attention. He tilted his head to the side, wondering if she possessed any skill with either weapon he saw upon her. Although he had underestimated his prey a few times in the past to his own detriment, she was so short and skinny that he could not prevent the doubt that filled his mind as he assessed the level of threat she might pose to him and whether she would require killing - without Mommy hissing at him that he must, he remained uncertain. It was harder to judge when she was sitting practically at his feet and had half her body hidden beneath a loose shirt at least two or three sizes too large, but he doubted she stood even a hair over five feet tall or weighed as much as 90 pounds ... even if standing in those ridiculously small boots.

Despite the weapons she appeared so comfortable wearing, he dismissed the oblivious ... girl, woman, child, whatever she might be ... sitting before him as not a being a threat - at least not to him. By the time the sun disappeared below the treetops but before its light had abandoned the lake, he had decided to wait before killing her. His mother’s voice was silent in his head, neither encouraging him to kill her nor to let her live. The girl was just sitting there, exceptionally still and quiet the whole time the hunter studied and analysed her, apparently lost within her own thoughts as she gazed out over the clear water, wholly unlike the behaviour of the bad teenagers who came to defile his home with their irresponsible drunken antics and almost unbearable noise - and Jason was nothing if not patient. He could wait to see if she was anything other than what he now judged her to be. Hoping that she would pack up her little campsite into her rickety little car and leave tonight or the next day at the very latest, he turned and left as silently as he had approached her.

He had wasted enough time upon her for now. The very last bit of hunting and camping season was almost over in this part of the New Jersey, and he had heard the arrival of another vehicle intruding into his domain while he was observing the skinny little girl - probably some irresponsible teenagers coming to Crystal Lake to do the bad things they always did, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, hunting for sport rather than sustenance, and fornicating - despoiling the peaceful autumn wilderness, the sacred land where he and his mother had died because of people like them, with their wickedness. He did not smile behind his mask in anticipation of eradicating the new arrivals, because killing was not a pleasure to him. It was simply his duty, the right thing to do to make his mother proud and what he  _ must  _ do to protect the land and other innocents like he had been when the bad teenage counsellors were too busy doing those bad things to save him from drowning - and like everything Jason did, he tried to do it well. The only pleasure he took in ending the lives of so many people who trespassed upon this land he considered his own was the simple satisfaction of a job well done. They had to pay for their desecration with their blood, with their lives; they deserved to die, and it was up to Jason to make sure that they did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jason Voorhees, Pamela Voorhees, Crystal Lake/Forest Green and all characters and events appearing in all Friday the 13th material belong to their respective creators, not to me.
> 
> Jayne is mine, although she is based heavily upon someone I know - all facts of her real life experiences are used with her permission and actual encouragement.
> 
> Chapter title is from Leonard Cohen - Teachers


	2. Sans Voix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Criticise away ... I want to know if/what I have screwed up.

**l’Enfer C’est Les Autres**

  
  


**Chapter II: Sans Voix**

Well before the sun sank below the crimson and golden treetops, Jayne had laced up the old jungle boots one of her former classmates who joined the Army after college sent her out of shock at finding they actually came in size 3 - small enough to fit her comfortably if she wore two pairs of socks - filled her daypack with her sketchbook and some pencils, the water bottle, and the pills she felt reluctant to leave behind unguarded, grabbed the walking stick she had attempted (and failed) to carve into something beautiful with a pocketknife during a fit of creativity back in high school, tied her knife sheath to her thigh, and slid her gun into its holster and secured it in a comfortable and effective draw position upon her hip in preparation for what she hoped would be a short hike from her campsite to the lake. Her legs were aching from working the gas, brake, and clutch for so many hours straight, but she was worried that if she did not walk around and stretch them out, she might not be able to walk at all the next morning. Plus, she really wanted to get to see the sunset over the lake. Fortunately for her, the hike over the faint remnants of an overgrown path past several ramshackle structures in various states of decay and collapse only took her about ten minutes before she reached the dock. Not knowing when last the boards had been treated against rot, she hesitantly stepped out onto the span, testing each worn, greyish plank before trusting it with her meagre weight. Thankfully, they held, although several creaked alarmingly beneath her as she cautiously limped out over the clear, greenish water. When she reached the end of the dock, using her walking stick for support, she very carefully lowered herself down into a seated position, mindful of where she placed her hands in fear of splinters. Any extra pain was something she studiously attempted to avoid, and even with peripheral neuropathy affecting her hands, they still could feel pain. Pain just felt … different … than she remembered. Tingly in addition to the sharpness, plus something muted, not quite dull, that she had never been able to describe. Actually, nothing she touched felt “right” anymore; all sensations had become strange beneath her fingertips even though the neuropathy began long enough ago that she no longer recalled precisely how things were  _ supposed  _ to feel.

Once she found a comfortable position, she set down her pack, pulled off her boots and her socks, and finally gazed out across the clear water toward the thick forest on the other side with a soft sigh of pleasure.

_ She had actually made it. _

Quickly, she sketched a rough outline of her first impression of the view over the lake from the rickety old dock, pleased to find herself surrounded by such beauty and solitude and not wanting to forget it, however long she might have left, despite how the pencil wobbled in her trembling hand. Crystal Lake was exactly what Anna had described to her across the campfire when they met hiking the Appalachian Trail, and it was exactly what her aching soul had been seeking.  _ Had ten years really passed since she and Anna had parted ways at the North Carolina border - she to return home for her junior year of high school, and Anna to complete the hike all the way back up North to where she lived? _ She wished she had continued hiking with Anna instead and that she had never returned home to Pontchatoula, Louisiana.

The perfect silence beside the lake was a comfort in the face of the memories that thoughts of the year following that summer dredged up in her mind, but the slight weight of the knife tied to her thigh and the warm pressure of the Kimber Ultra II .45 at her hip were far more comforting than any soothing words could have been, even out here at an abandoned camp with a rather dreadful, blood-soaked history in the middle of nowhere.  _ If only her mother had not been terrified of all weapons and a nearly obsessive pacifist _ , she thought,  _ maybe she would have been able to defend herself back then _ ... except that was totally ridiculous. The state of Louisiana was not going to give a sixteen year old girl a concealed carry permit even if her mother  _ had _ been willing to take her to the range, enroll her in the classes, and teach her to shoot, much less willing to buy her a gun.

Plus, if she had carried a gun to the party that night, exactly ten years ago tomorrow, she would probably be known as a killer today. Or, and perhaps more likely, her gun would have been used against her in the bloody horror show that followed in the third-floor attic room of that French Quarter apartment - after all,  _ he _ had used the x-acto knife he found in her purse on her when her desperate resistance coupled with whatever drugs he was on made it impossible for him to take what he wanted from her, so he had held her down upon the floor, punched her in her ribs and stomach a few times to get her to quit kicking, scratching, hitting, even biting; trying with strength born from desperation and terror to keep him off of her, then he took what he wanted with the blade,  _ her blade, _ instead - and she might be a corpse now instead of just a scarred and broken mistake. 

_ But would that really have been a worse outcome? _

Thinking about that memory left her eyes red and glassy, but true to form, her shoulders did not shake, no sobs succeeded at clawing their way out of her throat, and not a single tear managed to escape past her long, golden eyelashes to slide down her pale, slightly sunken cheeks. This, like the brief outburst of tears as she drove up the road to Crystal Lake earlier, was an anomaly for the ordinarily restrained and self-possessed young woman. Viewing her from behind, it would have appeared as if nothing was happening at all.

The lower the sun hung in the sky, the more the breeze pulled at and tangled her unruly mess of curls and waves, and she finally grew sufficiently irritated at the coppery strands blowing in her eyes to stir slightly from her comfortable position to pull her hair back from her face and tuck it behind her ears. It was still relatively thick despite being baby-fine, but a decade of low-dose chemotherapy to keep her immune system suppressed had taken its toll upon her hair, thinning it and leaving it duller and more prone to breakage. She occasionally joked to herself that the condition of her hair was a reflection of her in general. 

_ Dull and brittle _ .

Despite Jayne’s typically close to paranoid level of awareness of her surroundings, she did not have any sense of the intent gaze of one who had already killed so many, perhaps over a hundred, scrutinising her as she sat, and by the time the last of the already-set sun’s reflected rays were fading and she decided to return to her campsite, she was alone again with no evidence to suggest that she had been observed for so long and from so close. Had Jason remained watching her long enough to see how her hands trembled when she quickly stuffed her supplies back into the army green daypack atop the rattling pill bottles within or when she rolled her socks back over her child-sized feet then pulled on her boots, stiff fingers struggling to tighten and tie the laces, his estimation of the threat she could potentially pose to him would have sunk even lower. She slid her arms into the straps of her pack then picked up the walking stick with both hands, planting it firmly against the splintery grey wood upon which she sat and used it for leverage and balance as she slowly pulled herself up, first to her knees, then finally she stood upright, each movement accompanied by a virtual symphony of creaking and popping joints. By the time she was standing, a faint sheen of sweat over her pallid, almost grey-tinged face glistened in the twilight despite the chill air blowing off the lake. She leaned heavily upon the staff, gripping it so tightly with both hands her knuckles were white for several seconds before she turned around, her face a ghostly, grey-white mask of pain.

“I shouldn’t have sat so still for so long,” Jayne silently and morosely mused to herself as she limped down the dock to the shore, the decaying boards groaning in protest at her every light step. 

The Camp Blood killer would have dismissed her entirely upon seeing all that.

It took her significantly longer to limp back to her campsite than it had taken her to reach the lake, and no hint of the sun’s light remained by the time she reached the familiar, rusting bulk of Rodney, but despite her unfamiliarity with the area, she did not take out a flashlight to illuminate her path. One of the only positive points of her condition, indeed possibly the only such, was that her pupils being always dilated gave her excellent low-light vision, and she preferred not to damage that with artificial light sources if she could possibly avoid doing so. The starlight was more than sufficient for her to navigate to and around her campsite effectively, anyway, so she quickly had a small campfire burning in the pit she had dug upon her arrival.

“Now where in Cthulhu’s unpronounceable name did I put that damned shovel?” she muttered out loud in frustration while she limped around the clearing, searching for it without success.

However, between the pain and the side effects of so many medications, she was accustomed to having small holes in her memory, so while she was irritated (mostly at herself) to discover it missing before she had dug herself a latrine pit, the thought that the shovel might have been taken did not even cross her mind. “It’s probably in Rodney,” she decided, not interested in actually searching for it amidst the semi-organised clutter filling her vehicle - everything from the life she abandoned that she had not given away to her neighbours or donated to the Goodwill - until morning. Instead, she popped the back hatch, hopelessly hoping to see it resting atop her gear where she reasonably might have left it, but there was no shovel to be seen there within Rodney’s unlit confines - she had not actually set the interior lights not to turn on to protect her night vision; it was not the result of foresight or planning. The fuse simply had blown somewhere in northern Alabama and she just did not feel like hunting down an AutoZone to buy a replacement for it at any point during the long drive. With a little huff of irritation, she pulled out a lightweight folding chair from the pile of clutter in the back of the Civic then grabbed the topmost of the worn paperbacks from under her tarp and unfolded the seat, wincing at the loud, shrill squeal of aluminum on aluminum friction piercing the almost perfect silence. Once that was done, she lowered herself down carefully into its faded, waterproof canvas-webbing embrace beside the fire pit to read for a while. Although Jayne knew that she should eat something, especially before she took her bedtime medications, she just was not hungry and she found that the continued thought of food actually was vaguely nauseating, so she decided to forego supper, at least for the time being.

The only sounds as Jayne sat there with the novel resting unopened upon her lap were the faint crackling from the small fire she had built, the night breeze through the branches above catching on the dying leaves that had not yet fallen, and the quiet hitches of the breaths catching in her damaged lungs. She fully intended to read, to transport herself yet again into late nineteenth century France through one of her favourite novels since childhood, to allow herself to fall into the tragic obsessions and soaring genius of the pitiful, deformed and reviled murderer and monster called Erik who haunted the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, thinking it especially fitting given where she currently sat and the series of tragedies that had been unfolding at Camp Crystal Lake since 13 June, 1957. However, she was distracted from opening the well-worn and personally-annotated volume by her contemplation of her surroundings and what had compelled her to make the long journey from Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana to Wessex County, New Jersey.

As she drove through it earlier that day, Jayne had noted that the town of Forest Green had been just as small, dingy, run down, and typical of recession town, U.S.A. as she had imagined from what she had read, an unremarkable and uninspiring dot upon the regional maps where a few minor highways intersected, likely unchanged since Anna described to her a decade earlier when speaking about where her older sister had gone to summer camp. Maybe Anna had even been too generous in her verbal painting of the town once called Crystal Lake, with its main street featuring more glum buildings standing vacant with boards blinding the broken windows that sullenly glared at the few passers by than storefronts that appeared to be occupied. This had given her a valid excuse to hope that the older girl’s description of the woods surrounding Crystal Lake, which had sounded  _ far  _ more welcoming than the town despite the rumours of the absolute carnival of horror and murder that sporadically occurred in the perpetual gloom beneath the broad, thick canopy of spreading limbs of the silent, green sentinels standing watch, might actually have been reliable. Her suspicious, untrusting nature and pessimism had prepared her for disappointment, particularly when her attempts to research the area where Anna’s most intriguing stories all were set had netted her very little information about the area and even less confirmation of the possibility that her tales were true. The local newspaper had proved to be a dead end, it having ceased publication only a few years after Jayne’s birth, and the scanned copies of back issues available online struck her as being notably incomplete, with entire seasons being missing from several years’ archives. The fact that the town had even changed its  _ name _ several years earlier made the task of mining for the true story even more difficult. However, once her interest in a subject was piqued, Jayne was tenacious and imaginative in hunting down the information she sought. That any detailed information about the deaths occurring around Crystal Lake appeared to have been scrubbed from the internet just incited her to dig deeper. Anna’s heartbreaking tale of poor, deformed little Jason Voorhees who drowned in that lake upon his 11th birthday while the teenage counselors meant to be supervising the campers were too drunk and horny to notice, and his grief-maddened mother’s attempt to avenge his death and prevent any further such accidents due to their neglect and negligence by killing anyone at the camp who she caught distracted from their responsibility by drugs, sex, or alcohol before being beheaded herself with a machete by her last intended victim, a young woman named Alice who later vanished without a trace, only for that drowned boy to show up again some time later as a grown man who carried on his late mother’s murderous mission, proved immensely difficult for Jayne to confirm.

Her research proved that there was a statistically significant number more premature deaths and disappearances around Crystal Lake than typical of an area of similar size, population, and demographics, particularly incidents involving teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, leading her to believe there probably was at least some kernel of truth hidden away within Anna’s stories. She found almost no evidence she saw as reliable to convince her that these deaths and disappearances were the work of one man, but she  _ did _ find an article and a paragraph from an obituary confirming that Jason and Pamela Voorhees had been real people living in the vicinity of Crystal Lake, and further that the boy had supposedly died as a child - but no body was ever found to confirm that he was dead. That they had existed did not surprise Jayne in the least; most folktales and legends have some basis in reality. However, it did nothing to convince her that a neglected little boy who drowned came back as a vengeful murder machine like Anna had insisted. Still, the story had captivated her and filled her with pity for both Pamela and Jason, who she viewed as victims despite the murders ascribed to them - almost exactly the same as how she viewed Gaston Leroux’s fictional Opera Ghost. But the ill-starred Voorhees mother and child were supposed to have really lived and died and committed so many murders in the area where she now sat, unlike the far more famous Fantôme.

Although she had not actually expected to run into an unkillable backwoods serial mass killer (a concept she found fascinating all on its own) who preyed upon irresponsible teenagers by coming here, she could not deny the faint disappointment she felt that she had not seen any sign of the notorious Camp Blood Killer while she relaxed upon the very dock from which he had allegedly jumped, fallen, or been pushed, depending upon who was telling his history. Despite the strong feelings of sympathy and empathy she felt for him and his supposed plight, she felt oddly content in her knowledge that such a being would not feel similarly about her. No doubt, if he still stalked these woods, he would kill her the moment he laid eyes upon her.

Taking comfort in that dark thought, Jayne shifted upon the creaking canvas webbing in a vain attempt to get comfortable then cracked open the book and began to read Gaston Leroux’s words aloud to herself, allowing them to flow over her and carry her away to another continent, another century.

“Je voulus voir le visage de la Voix et, instinctivement, par un geste dont je ne fus point la maîtresse, car je ne me possédais plus, mes doigts rapides arrachèrent le masque…”

“Oh! horreur!… horreur!… horreur!…”

—

—

While Jayne sat quietly reading to herself before the small fire in her solitary campsite, at the other end of the former Camp Crystal Lake property a very different sort of campfire built from a stack of logs four feet high burned merrily. Three brand new, top of the line tents with poisonous green rain flies appeared to have sprung up from the earth like a trio of deadly neon mushrooms, and the ground around them was already littered with almost a dozen crushed beer cans before the sun had set.

Jenelle took a sip from her can of PBR, brushed her short, fine, platinum blonde hair back from her face, then grinned at the taller, auburn haired girl sitting on the log beside her with a flash of her perfectly even, white teeth in a somewhat predatory smirk.

“Oh, c’mon! It’s not  _ that _ cold yet, and we’ve got the fire to warm us up after.” Jenelle’s grin widened as she continued trying to coax her friend to go down to the lake with her for a swim, and she teasingly continued, “That is, if Frank isn’t hot enough for you.”

Lainey rolled her cornflower blue eyes with a dramatic sigh then shook her head, the dark auburn curls reflecting the flames to frame the perfect oval of her face with a wild mane of fire. She could think of a hundred things she would prefer to be doing with the first two nights of Fall Break in the time it took her to reply to her far more daring friend. 

“I don’t even know why I let him talk me into coming out here with you guys! I hate camping, I hate nature, I’ve never even  _ thought _ about going hunting much less actually gone - ”

Jenelle interrupted her, “ - but you couldn’t let me be stuck as the only girl on this trip! And besides, you  _ know _ how hot Frank’s ass looks in BDUs.”

As if summoned out of the darkness surrounding their campsite by the mention of his name, the aforementioned Frank suddenly reappeared to squeeze his slim yet broad-shouldered swimmer’s body onto the log in between the two girls, smirking while he wrapped one dark-tanned arm around the shoulders of each and pulling them in toward his chest. Knowing that it would be welcome, one hand “inadvertently” landed on Lainey’s left breast where it stayed.

“Nice of you to notice, Jen,” Frank replied to the blonde with a flirtatious smile. “But I don’t know how happy Mike’ll be to hear how you can’t stop staring at my hot ass.”

While Lainey snuggled into Frank’s side with a little sigh that he thought did not sound entirely like the contentment he wanted and expected to hear, Jenelle shrugged his arm off her shoulder a little more forcefully than was probably necessary then punched him in the ribs with a playful laugh. Frank grunted, jolted against Lainey’s side (which was the only good part about being hit, he decided), surprised by the unexpected power behind the blow which he thought might even turn into a fist-shaped bruise by morning. However, the potent mixture of his pride born from being tall, athletic, and traditionally if somewhat blandly attractive and the natural insecurity of youth could not allow him to let anyone see that he had actually felt pain from a teasing blow from a 17-year-old girl, so Frank resisted the urge to rub his side and instead laughed with her.

“Where is Mike, anyway?” Jenelle asked, her carefully studied and oft-practiced, husky “sex-kitten” voice still warm with amused laughter.

Frank pulled a flask from his pocket and took a swig that emptied half its contents down his throat before nearly choking, his eyes bulging and his face turning deep red beneath his tan as the bottom shelf vodka he had managed to acquire via a fake ID he had forged himself burned all the way down his oesophagus to his gut, bringing tears to his eyes. It took him a moment to catch his breath; and, once he could breathe again, he took another swig, albeit a smaller one, just to prove to himself that he was tough enough, before he replied to her.

“Him and Dave went to stock the blinds for tomorrow morning. Should be back any time now.”

Lainey winced visibly at Frank’s grammar, but Jenelle ignored it and nodded in satisfaction at his answer.

“Good. I wasn’t looking forward to lugging everything there before sunrise, but they’d better hurry back or else I’m going swimming without them.”

Already peeved, Lainey slapped her arm to kill the bug she felt but did not see crawling over her skin then leapt upon the opportunity to complain.

“I don’t know why we can’t sleep past 5 a.m. I saw ducks on the lake this afternoon when we drove in ...”

Both Frank and Jenelle laughed at that.

Ignoring their laughter, Lainey continued, “And why’d we have to come  _ here _ to hunt? There’s tons of other places, like where you guys went last year - places where bunches of people didn’t get murdered by some retarded freakshow dude and his psycho-bitch of a mother.”

Frank scoffed.

“That’s just a dumb story to frighten little kids into behaving on campouts, so they won’t wander off and get lost. It doesn’t even make any sense! How could a ten-year-old ‘tard see his mother killed  _ after he drowned _ ?!” Shaking his head in wonder that a girl who consistently earned straight A’s in school like Lainey could be so damned stupid about everything else, he went on, driving what he saw as the nail into the coffin of the greatly exaggerated if not outright fictional Voorhees’ massacres. “And there’s no way some kid too fucking stupid to ride the short bus even coulda survived all those years out in the woods alone.”

The boy’s explanation of why she had nothing to fear made sense to her and actually did help Lainey to relax, and it helped even more when he handed his flask over to her and told her she could finish it off.

She was in the middle of downing the last of the cheap vodka and Frank was staring at how the muscles of her throat undulated as she chugged it without choking, when all of a sudden they heard the snap of a branch cracking right behind them. Both Jenelle and Lainey screamed, the latter actually spitting out the alcohol she had not yet swallowed in her surprise. Frank jumped to his feet, wincing when the ankle he had broken so badly it had required surgery only three months earlier twisted beneath his shifting weight, and he whirled around to face whatever or whoever was there, his fists raised to the level of his throat in an untrained version of a boxer’s pugilistic stance. The two girls wound up standing, too, nervously hovering slightly behind the slender swimmer to either side of him within a single heartbeat’s time.

The two boys who had just sneaked up from behind the trio doubled over laughing.

“Gotcha good!” Mike chortled, his eyes bright with mirth. “Dude, you should’ve seen your face!”

Lainey turned and glared at the boys. “Not funny!”

Jenelle looked over at her best friend with a crooked pirate’s smile and shrugged sheepishly.

“It kinda was, though.”

Lainey huffed and turned her back on all of them. She did not even want to be here, but she had come along because they asked her to join them on the hunting trip -  _ but if they wanted her to come, then why were they being so shitty _ ? On the other hand, Jenelle had been camping with her older brothers since she was old enough to hike a whole mile without needing a break, and she was used to the way the guys acted. The blonde even felt oddly flattered that Mike, Dave, and Frank were still treating her like one of the guys … albeit like one of the guys who they also wanted to fuck. She liked that change enough that she could feel the heat creeping up her cheeks, telling her that she was blushing. The fact that Lainey, beautiful Lainey who all the guys seemed to worship, was so miserable and clearly unable to hang with them left Jenelle feeling perversely proud. She might not have a perfect figure or the face and hair of a 1940s movie goddess, but dammit, she was fun and the guys knew it.

Trying to keep the peace, something he found himself doing far more often than he would have liked while in the company of his friends, particularly when the overly dramatic auburn-haired beauty was with them, Dave told Lainey, “To answer your question: my pops always says animals tend to be out and more active around sunrise so the hunting’s better, and nobody comes out here anymore so there’s more game for us.”

“And the sooner we get to the blind, the sooner we can get to shooting and drinking!” Mike added with a wide grin, grabbing Jenelle by the hips and pulling her firmly up against himself.

Their unseen, unheard watcher felt the familiar rage and disgust growing within him as he listened to their conversation, although there was no outward, visible evidence to indicate that mounting fury aside from the tension knotting the heavy muscles of his broad shoulders.  _ This _ was exactly the sort of recklessness and irresponsibility Jason existed to punish. Mocking names like those which the red-haired girl just called him had cut him to the quick when he was a child, but his childhood was a long time ago, and such insults meant close to nothing to him now. The words of the soon-to-be dead were all but meaningless, nothing of more significance than a faint breeze blowing across a field of tall grass. Killing them would not be personal despite their insults - it simply was his duty.

Lainey leaned back against Frank, moulding herself against his body. Subtly rubbing her arse against his crotch, she murmured huskily, “Why’d you want to get up before the crack of dawn to sit out in the cold when you could stay in your warm bed with me?”

Frank’s arms wrapped around her waist, his hands sliding up under her sweatshirt to caress the smooth, warm skin stretched taut over the delicate dips and ridges of her ribs beneath the thick fabric. “Both sound real good to me,” he replied with a quiet chuckle. “But the blind’s here - and if you didn’t notice, my bed isn’t.”

Frank could feel Lainey stiffen in his embrace and he knew that the deep, anticipatory breath she took meant that she was winding up, about to go off on him, But, before Lainey could say anything, Jenelle pulled her shirt off over her head and threw it at the pair with a devilish smile and a silvery laugh.

“I don’t care what you two do, but  _ I’m _ going swimming,” Jenelle proclaimed with a supercilious smirk, feeling the weight of Dave’s gaze fixed upon how her smallish breasts nearly spilled out of the too-small push-up bra she had bought (on Lainey’s advice - not that the auburn haired beauty needed to do anything of the sort to enhance the appearance of her lushly curving yet slender figure) to cause just that sort of reaction.

The blonde sauntered over to Mike’s tent, intentionally swinging her boyish hips in imitation of Lainey’s eye-catching, overtly sexual walk, and picked up a towel and a solar-powered lantern. Mike and Dave followed not far behind her, taking off their shirts despite the chill in the night air and grabbing towels of their own. Jenelle was very pleased to feel both boys’ gazes fixed firmly upon her instead of on Lainey like usual as she ran off, leading them off down a barely-visible trail toward the lake like a half-naked pied piper.

“C’mon! Last one in’s axe-murder bait!” she called over her shoulder before digging in and sprinting, the lantern’s light bobbing madly off the trees around them as her white towel streamed behind her like a banner.

Dave and Mike sprinted right after her.

Once the other three were out of sight, Frank slid his hands up higher beneath Lainey’s shirt, brushing the underside of her breasts with the tips of his fingers, and he was rewarded for his boldness with the feeling of her shivering against him. This was far preferable to the imminent bitchfest about how much she hated the woods and everything that had happened thus far on the trip that he was expecting from her, and he put his mouth to her ear.

“D’you want to go swimming with them, or would you like to christen my new tent, sugartits?”

Giggling at the sensation of his hot breath pouring over her sensitive ear and the tingling left behind when the tip of his tongue brushed over the curved shell, Lainey looked coyly over her shoulder back at the boy standing behind her and pressed her arse against him with a little wiggle, even though she thought he was a weirdo for calling her “sugartits.” 

“Do you really have to ask?” she purred.

The silent, masked hunter watched the obliviously giggling teenagers rushing over to the tent, clearly paying attention to nothing except each other. Within the span of a single heartbeat, he knew exactly how to deal with these two. Jason saw them disappear into the tent, heard the hiss of the zipper being pulled closed, and then waited. He knew it would not take long for them to become thoroughly distracted by what they were doing to each other’s bodies, and he listened, biding his time before stepping out from the concealing darkness of the forest. It did not take long, even by his standards, for the little gasps and groans coming from within the tent to settle into that familiar rhythm that signalled to him that it was time to act.

As Jason laid the bear trap upon the ground at a calculated distance just outside of the tent and pulled open the heavy steel jaws then inserted the pin to set it before sweeping a faint covering of leaves over the stained metal to hide it, he watched the undulation of the conjoined shadows projected upon the tent wall and listened intently, not out of any voyeuristic interest but just so he could time this correctly.

“Oh, oh yeah, babe! That’s just what I - ” the boy’s words trailed off into a long, low groan accompanied by a higher-pitched giggle from the girl. 

All the pieces in place and the trap now set, Jason melted back into the camouflaging woods to spring it.

Inside the tent, without any warning, Lainey tensed and sat up straight, her fingers digging into Frank’s broad shoulders at the sound of … something … outside of the tent, moving around. Surprised and confused that she would stop so abruptly in the midst of riding him harder and faster than she ever had before, he looked up at her, distracted momentarily by the sheen of sweat gleaming upon her pale, heavy breasts as she panted in the dimly lit tent before his gaze made it high enough to see her auburn curls bouncing around her shoulders and clinging to her damp cheeks and neck as her head whipped side to side.

“What - ”

Lainey interrupted him with a hissed whisper.

“Shut UP! Didn’t you hear that? I think something’s out there!”

Frank rolled his eyes. At times like this, he wondered why he had ever gotten with a typical city bitch like her - someone who was terrified of bugs, who did not even  _ own  _ a sleeping bag, and who was a vegetarian at that. But holy fuck, her tits were magnificent! Yeah, that was why. At the time, he had thought that a fabulous pair of knockers would be enough to keep his interest, but now he was less certain. Maybe it was better to have  _ something  _ in common with a girlfriend. But those tits … he reached up and gave them a squeeze, just to remind himself why he was with Lainey.

Irritably, she knocked his hands away, and Frank gritted his teeth, barely resisting the urge to grab her chest even harder, just to be obstinate.

“I’m sure it was just a rabbit or maybe a squirrel,” he muttered, his hands dropping to the curve of her hips and his hips beginning to thrust up into her again, trying not to lose his erection to her deflating ridiculousness. “You know, something little, fluffy, and cute.”

Lainey really wanted to believe him, but the sensual mood had been shattered for her and no amount of reassurance, stimulation, or outright pleasure would bring her back into the moment until she knew that whatever was out there was not a threat. Even if Jason Voorhees was not real, she had read that bears were a real threat in the area.

“Couldn’t you go check? What if it’s Mike and Dave playing a prank? Or maybe it’s like a mountain lion, or a snake … or a bear!”

Frank could feel the tension in her body pulling her taut as a guitar string, and his erection went soft inside of her. Despite the genuine fear in her wide, cornflower eyes and the trembling of her full bottom lip, he felt no sympathy for the frightened girl, only disgust.

“Fine,” he sneered as he stood hunched over due to the low ceiling of the tent, not even bothering to hide his disappointment from Lainey.

Even if his friends were waiting just outside the tent in some sort of juvenile prank, Frank did not care. He was so pissed off at the interruption - of course she heard something just when things were getting _good_ - that he did not bother to put his boxers or pants back on. _Whoever or whatever it was out there deserved getting flashed; and, if Lainey liked his ass so much, then let her get a good, long look at it - she was_ not _gonna be getting to see it for much longer._ At that moment and with that aggravated thought, he decided that he was breaking up with her … well, he would just as soon as he found a suitable replacement. Putting up with her bullshit remained preferable to going without. She might have been a bitch, but she certainly was hot.

Frank unzipped the tent and poked his head out, looking around irritably.

“Hey, guys! It ain’t funny!”

He looked around, but he made the mistake of trying to look straight through the bonfire, ruining his night vision and filling his sight with several blank, blinded spots of white. Lainey scooted back to the safety of the far wall of the tent, watching Frank from behind with wide eyes. A twig snapped, the sound sharp as a musket firing in the silence otherwise broken only by the heavy breathing of the two teens.

“Okay, wherever you are - that’s  _ it _ . Fuck you guys,” Frank snarled, stepping out of the tent into the fire-warmed darkness of the autumn evening.

Stepping out right into the steel-jawed bear trap that closed around his bare ankle, the very ankle that had so recently been encased within a cast, with an audible crack followed a millisecond later by a grinding crunch. The fair skin of his sock tan at the top of his shoe was torn open and the crushed spears of white bone within were revealed, jagged and darkly wet in the flickering firelight.

It took a moment for him to register it, to  _ feel _ the shredded neurons sputtering pain up his leg like candles in the rain right before the intense, blinding white agony surged up through him. An inhuman, guttural howl that Frank did not recognise as having come from himself was wrenched from his throat as he collapsed heavily into the curled, brown leaves littering the ground that crunched softly beneath him, his ankle giving out beneath him and twisting into a dripping, red ruin of ripped flesh and shattered bone as he sprawled in the forest’s detritus. From the position in which he landed, he could turn his head and see into the dim depths of the tent, his shocked gaze meeting Lainey’s. He could not comprehend how this could have happened -  _ this was no juvenile prank! Who would have put a fucking  _ bear trap _ right outside of his tent? Why would anyone even do such a thing?  _

Not fully understanding what had just happened, the girl clutched the sleeping bag up to her heaving, bare chest and scooted backwards on her arse until she was huddled snugly against the back wall of the tent, a beaten puppy whimpering her fears.

“Frank! What … what happened? What’s wrong? FRANK!”

But the boy could only scream and grunt, shock quickly having stolen the ability to form words from his mouth.

A shivery whisper came from the tent wall against which Lainey shuddered, the sound of the waterproofed fabric parting around the sharp, dully-gleaming silver point of the razor-sharp blade sliding through it. Before the girl even had time to turn her head to look, she felt a strong hand in her hair, wrenching her head back, and a hard knee slam into her back over which the hand gripping her mussed curls bowed her body backward. Her begging and gibbering was cut short when the icy edge of the blade bit into her throat, allowing a second red mouth to gape open below her chin in a horrible, soundless shriek that choked out great gouts of crimson to pour over her quivering breasts in perfect rhythm with her stuttering, ever-slowing heartbeats.

Well before the girl’s body realised it was dead and stopped shaking, the killer released his grip upon her hair, carelessly letting her body crumple to the reddening tent floor, then he arose with an almost feline degree of fluid grace improbable in so large and muscular a man. Jason stepped around the tent, the dried, brown corpses of summer’s leaves crunching beneath his black work boots with every step, for disguising his presence in perfect silence was no longer a necessary exercise, and now he wanted his prey to know that he was coming, that Death was bearing down upon him to punish him for his sins, for polluting the sacred land with his drunken fornication. The boy stared up at the monster who had just murdered his future ex-girlfriend looming over him, the whites of his eyes showing around smoky grey irises with pinprick pupils glistening liquidly in terror at the sight of the haunting mask. His soft, young mouth moved but no fully-formed words came out once the hunter with his dripping blade finally revealed himself fully to the boy whose mangled hind limb was caught in his trap.

“H-huh … huh … huh huh … ih i-ih ih … no ... oh no oh no …”

Jason cocked his head to the left, wondering for a brief moment what the boy was trying to say to him. However, listening to the talking dead was a waste of his time, so he slammed the edge of the machete down into the juncture where Frank’s neck and shoulder met, nearly bisecting the boy completely on a diagonal. There was no need to extend his life any further as the masked killer took no pleasure in watching his victims suffer. Wrenching the blade out of the corpse in which it was embedded with an arcing spray of scarlet heat that spattered his tattered clothing, he then proceeded toward the lake. 

He still had three more irresponsible teenagers with whom to contend before his duties for the night were complete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions, comments, and criticism very welcome!
> 
> A few notes about this story:  
> First, Jason herein is not any single incarnation of the character, but rather an amalgamation of my favourite aspects of one of my favourite characters since I was far too young to be watching slasher flicks. My interpretation of him is the result of 30 years of being amazed by the Camp Blood Killer - but I readily admit that I’m no expert - and my own interpretations of the rather internally inconsistent but utterly delightful film series. He was born 13 June, 1946 and died for the first time on 13 June, 1957, only to be resurrected when his mother committed the first murders in 1958. Supernatural forces were involved with what he did and why between 1958-1979, but there were reasons Pamela did not know about his resurrection. After seeing his mother killed, he took over her vengeance and became a guardian for the cursed land upon which CCL is located. After his mother’s death, Parts II - VII happened, then he was raised from the lake again, and he has been killing and defending his territory for several years now.
> 
> If you want to know how I picture Jason whilst writing this, it’s mostly the versions from Jason Lives & The New Blood, although he has the thin, blonde hair and blind-white (but no longer missing eye) from the 2009 reimagining - just switch sides. His good eye is CJ Graham’s incredibly arresting green/hazel. His body is a somewhat regenerated version of Kane Hodder in VII with some bones peeking through. His clothes are mostly like a more ragged version of VI but not as totally shredded as in VII - when he moves, a witness would see mottled, greyish skin and some exposed bone through the tears and holes. He’s as large as in Freddy vs Jason and the 2009 flick. As for his face - picture 2009 Jason’s face reversed and with all the damage done in Parts III - VII that has slowly been regenerating since he was last dredged from the lake. The hockey mask is a version of the Part III or 2009 mask that has been through everything in Parts III - VII that was glued/epoxied together after Tina Shepard split it in half
> 
> Jason’s mind fascinates me. I picture him as being highly logic-driven, and I imagine that he views most things he experiences in terms of action/consequence.
> 
> He will not kill children because they are innocent - unless one is extremely obnoxious and gets in the way of a kill he is compelled to perform AND cannot be moved out of the way otherwise (I’m looking at you, Tommy!) - and he will not kill animals, excepting for food, for the same reason - and he does not eat much or often.
> 
> Chapter title is from Leonard Cohen - Teachers


	3. Run For Your Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions, comments, and criticism would be appreciated!

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter III: Run For Your Life**

Jenelle heard the boys crashing through the underbrush as she raced toward the lake, laughing with unbridled glee as the cool wind rushed through her hair and stained her cheeks dark pink. She could hear them coming up from behind, gaining on her, but it did not matter - she just ran faster, ignoring the cold flames of each breath searing and tearing into her throat and lungs. Running like this, it felt almost as if she were flying, freed from the cage of her organised, structured life. Nobody could catch her. Nobody could tether her to the earth. Up ahead, the lake came into view, its night-blackened water darkly welcoming, then she heard the resonance of the wooden dock slapping beneath her sneakers as she dropped the lantern and her towel to lie upon the weathered boards. She felt the heat from a pair of hands reaching for her waist from behind, but she danced just out of their reach, giggling triumphantly as she kicked off her shoes, shimmied out of her shorts and panties, and stripped off her bra then shallowly dove off the end of the dock.

_ Nobody could catch her tonight. _

The water was shockingly cold and it stole the breath from her burning lungs immediately upon impact, the lake’s chill caress immediately banishing the daze of alcohol from her mind, sobering her instantly, but Jenelle did not care. She had always loved running, how it allowed her to forget the sometimes unbearable pressures of school and her parents’ expectations, to forget about trying to obtain one more scholarship so she could attend college without going into debt, to forget about how boys inevitably saw Lainey first. Instead, running forced her to focus entirely upon her body, to concentrate upon her breathing, the steady building of lactic acid that burned in her muscles, the rhythm of her stride, and the placement of her feet. But tonight, racing through the woods with her two best friends right at her heels, it had felt outright  _ euphoric. _

Jenelle’s head broke through the surface of the water and she turned around to face the dock, grinning. Mike was standing at the end of the dock when her face emerged, illuminated by the pallid glow of the lantern that limned his slim, hard body with silver as he jumped almost straight up into a cannonball that landed just shy of where Jenelle was treading water with a loud splash. Behind where he just stood, Dave sat beside the lantern she had dropped, rolling his socks off of his feet and placing them inside his shoes before he stood and quickly stripped. The differences between the two young men were perfectly illustrated by how they approached getting into the lake, but despite how nearly opposite their personalities were in so many ways, the pair had been best friends, sharing almost everything, for as long as Jenelle could remember.

“Fuck, it’s cold!” Mike sputtered upon surfacing.

Laughing at Mike’s discomfort as she stretched out and laid back to float, the hard, rosy tips of her breasts peeking up out of the water, Jenelle called out to Dave, “C’mon, slowpoke!”

Dave looked out over the water as he fumbled with his belt and the button at his waistband, his attention and gaze fixed themselves upon Jenelle, and it was with a shock not unlike electricity that he found himself noticing how her short, fair hair clung to the delicate shape of her skull and the black eyeliner smeared around her mischief-bright eyes before his own eyes were drawn down along the pale line of her throat to the peaks of her breasts exposed above the water for a moment. Simultaneously, his pants and boxers dropped to the wooden planks with a muted thump and he quickly stepped out of them then dove into the cold, black water.

As soon as Dave’s head reappeared above the water, Jenelle grabbed his shoulders from behind, dunking him with a giggle that was swiftly cut off when Mike pulled her back to his chest, one arm wrapping around her torso just below her breasts. He held her so close to his body that she could actually feel the staccato vibrations of his teeth chattering through hers.

Mike pressed himself into the warmth of her with an audible sigh of relief, more intent upon feeling the heat her body emitted than the intimacy of their naked embrace.

“It’s too fucking cold, babe,” he muttered.

Even though Jenelle was not facing him, Mike thought he could hear her disappointed frown in her voice when she retorted, “I think it feels great!”

“Well good for you,” he snapped, letting his arm go slack around her. “I’m getting out.”

She turned around in his loose, one-armed embrace and tossed her hair, sprinkling his face with droplets of water before pushing him away.

“Fine, but I’m staying in.”

Mike heard Dave’s laughter over the quiet splashing of his strong strokes slicing through the water as he swam back toward the short dock. By the time he pulled him out of the lake and looked back toward his friends, he saw that Dave and Jenelle’s limbs were already entwined as they played, giggling and splashing each other. “So that’s how it is,” he thought over the chattering of his teeth with a bitter bite of disappointment while towelling off. 

Trying to ignore the splashes, their breathless gasps, and their delighted laughter while slowly putting his clothes back on, Mike turned his back to the pair in the lake. He really thought this trip would be his chance to finally get with Jenelle - it was he who had suggested they invite girls along this, and it was he who had the balls to actually ask her to come along,  _ not _ Dave. It had taken Mike over a year to build up the courage to come that close to asking her out, even though they had been best friends ever since her family moved from Rhode Island to New Jersey right before they both started third grade. Back then, he had seen Jenelle as just one of the guys, a slim daredevil who ran like the legions of Hell were on her heels with a wicked sense of humour and a crooked pirate’s smile, until suddenly, sometime during the previous summer, she had become something else.

Something mesmerising.

Something he knew he was meant to have.

Mike could not pinpoint the exact moment when the shift happened, when he first saw her as something other than his childhood friend who just happened to be a girl. Her personality had not changed as far as he could tell -  _ but maybe  _ he _ had _ ? She had not suddenly become super hot like some of the girls; Jenelle remained slim and almost boyish with her feathery blonde hair clipped pixie short, but he unexpectedly found himself staring at her, his mouth suddenly going dry, wanting to run his fingers through her hair to see if it felt as soft as it looked and wondering what her mouth tasted like. He did not think she noticed the change in him, how his gaze followed her with longing as if magnetically charged at track and cross country meets. How she talked to him remained the same, though - sarcastic and teasing, peppery rather than sweet, yet she never was outright unkind to him.

This trip,  _ tonight,  _ was when he hoped it all would change in her mind, too, just as everything had changed in his over the summer, but instead he was alone upon the dock and Jenelle was down there, beyond his reach, naked in the water with Dave.  _ God, why did it have to be Dave _ ? Of all the guys they knew, Mike had never even considered that his best friend could be a threat to his plans for himself and Jenelle to get together. Dave was just so …  _ Dave _ . Goofy, a bit clumsy, more cautious by far than he or Jenelle; a clownish, gawky boy with hands and feet too large for his skinny beanpole of a body - Dave definitely was the comic relief and not the guy who would get the girl if movies were any sort of a reflection of real life.

Mike stole a glance at the pair in the water, realising that they had fallen silent at some point while he was getting dressed, and regretted looking instantly. Dave had his long arms wrapped around her and their mouths were locked together. Mike only realised that he had kicked their towels off the side of the dock in his disgust when he saw the plush, white rectangles floating there, pale, limp, and slowly sinking into the liquid darkness. He clenched his jaw, trying not to care as he pulled his small flashlight from his pocket and stormed off the dock toward the woods. He did not even look back.

“See you guys later. I’m going back,” he muttered, kicking at a rock that went sailing off into the forest.

They did not reply, not that he expected them to. They probably did not even notice he was leaving.

—

—

Blade out and dripping blood that looked black in the starlit forest, Jason followed the barely visible traces of the long-unmaintained trail that the three remaining teenagers had taken toward the lake, his breathing perfectly steady and his footsteps eerily silent upon the bed of pine needles and dead leaves. His mind was empty but for thoughts of his duty to this sacred ground, the pressing need to obey his mother and rid it of the unwelcome trespassers whose mere presence was sacrilege punishable only by death. The hunter’s sharp ears picked up the arrhythmic sounds of someone approaching before he saw the thin beam of a flashlight bouncing off the trees and underbrush. Stepping off the trail, he melted into the darkness, becoming just another shadow in the woods, anticipation flooding his acute senses.

He did not have to wait long.

The boy was almost stumbling with every step, his head down, muttering “fuck, fuck, fuck” with each incautious placement of his feet upon the rough terrain. When he was barely a metre away, Jason stepped back onto the trail directly in front of the boy.

Mike was lost in thoughts of anger and regret, his disappointment at what might have been, what  _ should  _ have been, as he made his way back toward their tents, almost totally unaware of the trees around him or the path beneath his feet. It seemed to be a much longer distance now that he was walking and not racing after Jenelle, each step of the trek dragging him down without the buoyant hope that their relationship would so soon become something more, and rocks, fallen branches, and roots seemed to pop up out of nowhere along the trail just to snag his feet and send him stumbling. He did not even notice the man standing on the trail right in front of him until he almost walked into him. Mike was accustomed to being one of the taller people in any room, having hit six foot one the summer before ninth grade, so it felt strange to have to look up to see another man’s face.

Only it was a battered, chipped, and gouged bone-white hockey mask with red markings and a deep cut through the right side of the forehead that he saw tilted down to look back at him rather than a face. 

With a startled gasp, Mike fell back a single step at the same moment that the masked man took a step toward him, the beam of his flashlight reflecting off the long, bloodstained blade as it swung up into his gut just below his sternum. The air was driven forcibly from Mike’s chest with an audible “whoosh,” and for a moment, briefer than a heartbeat, Mike thought the man had only punched him. 

_ Why’d he hit me _ ?  _ I didn’t do anything to him! _

The flashlight fell from the teenager’s numb hand with a dull thunk and rolled into the underbrush, but Mike did not notice. He opened his mouth, intending to ask what the fuck the dude’s problem was, but when he opened his mouth, only blood bubbled out to drip down his chin. The thick, coppery fluid coated his tongue and lips, spewing from his mouth as he coughed, his lungs spasming, the pressure in his chest growing more and more extreme with each panicked, agonised breath he tried but failed to take, and his vision began to fade as he felt himself lifted up off the ground.

_ Why was this happening to him? He just wanted a weekend of beer and hunting and the girl he thought he might love …  _

Jason watched impassively as the boy’s hands twitched and curled into claws before falling limply to his sides, his jerking and quivering body suspended above the ground upon his blade, blood oozing out around the steel impaling his chest to drip onto the masked killer’s gloved hand and spurting out of his mouth with each attempt at filling his lungs with oxygen as his eyes went empty and blank. He was not quite dead, but Jason knew very well that he would be in under two minutes, so he shook the body off his machete and allowed it to crumple to the ground in a pathetic heap. After a few moments of contemplation, the hunter stretched the corpse out across the trail, deciding to make use of it as a trip line in case either of the remaining trespassers should manage to escape him at the lake and try to flee back to their campsite.

_ Three down. Two to go. _

The masked killer resumed his silent walk toward the lake in which he had drowned as a child without another glance back at the boy’s broken body he left sprawled across the old trail. Once he reached the edge of the forest that encroached closer upon the lake with each year that passed since the area around the old camp had been abandoned in response to the many violent deaths and disappearances in the area, he concealed his thick bulk behind a tree and watched.

A boy and a girl were in the water a few yards past the remains of a short dock that still jutted out into the water although the home it once served had burned to the ground at least two decades earlier, if he recalled, their faces pressed together and their arms twining around each other, blind to their surroundings and the danger lurking so close. Jason could hear the girl’s giggles when the pair broke apart which grew louder and wilder when the boy splashed water into her face and she, in return, pounced on him and pushed him under the water.

Seeing the boy held down below the surface, even for so brief a moment, sent a faint shudder of memory through the Camp Blood Killer.

The lake probably should have frightened Jason, since he had died for the first time trapped beneath its surface - and drowning was the worst death he had suffered, by far. He could still remember how it felt, his mind and his lungs screaming for air as he clawed desperately at the water, fighting to find the surface, how when he opened his mouth to cry for help or just to catch a breath of precious air the water rushed in instead, filling his sinuses and his lungs and no matter how he struggled and fought he could not spit it out, could not cough it out. Every single second of his struggles passed more slowly than he had ever imagined was possible, his awful last moments of life stained by agony and terror, explosive pressure and pain, until his twisted and malformed young body gave up. He had died then, truly  _ died _ , and he never found out exactly how long he had been dead before whatever force still drove him had dredged his cold corpse from the lake and brought him back to serve this sacred, cursed land.

He had been nervous around the lake at first, but time and experience quickly dulled the fears that might have hindered him in carrying out his duties and fulfilling his purpose. The clear, greenish water had haunted his dreams back when he still thought sleep was a nightly necessity, and it might still when he occasionally slept, although he had no dreams anymore, at least none he could recall upon awakening. Then, later, the lake had been used to imprison him for years at a time, but Jason was patient, and inevitably he would be released, he knew - all he had to do was wait. It was almost peaceful down there, he had found, trapped within the clear water, so like the grave to and from which Tommy Jarvis had brought him. Now, Crystal Lake was nothing scary to him; it was just another part of the realm he was charged with defending, and it had often proved useful in carrying out his rôle of defender … and executioner. 

The teens in the water were so distracted by their play and exploration of each other that they failed to notice the large shadow that pulled away from the dense woods and quietly approached the water’s edge, smoothly and silently sliding into the chilly water well away from the circle illuminated by the pale light of the lantern upon the dock. Jason did not pay any mind to the cold seeping into his ragged clothes and enveloping his body, unaffected by and barely even aware of it as he skirted around the light to approach his quarry unseen. Such things as physical discomfort simply did not matter to him anymore. Still, he preferred to catch his victims unawares whenever possible, lessening the chance that they would fight back and possibly injure him. He  _ could  _ feel pain to a certain extent, though it was not enough to stop him, and he was not sure how much damage his body could take before he would be incapacitated. It was not something he ever intended to learn.

It was easy enough to approach the first completely undetected from behind and below the water’s surface.

-

Dave could not believe what was happening. Mike could not handle the cold and left him with Jenelle. He knew that Mike had a thing for her, that he was hoping to use this trip to show her that he liked her more than just as one of his best friends, that he wanted almost desperately to hook up with her, but when Jenelle grabbed his shoulders and pulled him under, he could feel the hard nipples tipping her softly rounded breasts, the sleek muscles of her stomach and her firm thighs brushing against his back as he sank, and he decided he did not care if this was a betrayal of sorts. Mike was his best friend, but Mike did not take him seriously, never had. It felt like Mike  _ knew  _ that Dave would always be there, that he would forgive being left out and taken for granted. Dave suddenly felt sick of being taken for granted by his friends and dismissed by girls. Jenelle was here, and unless he was badly misreading her signals, she seemed … interested. 

_ Was this really possible _ ?

Dave’s thoughts and residual hesitance were immediately banished from his mind when Jenelle’s mouth met his, hotter than the water was cold, and then her tongue was in his mouth. He thought Mike might have said something, but when he pulled back from her kisses to look, Mike was already off the dock and about to disappear into the forest. Then he felt the scant warmth of Jenelle’s body rub against him, her small breasts pressing into his chest, and he forcefully banished Mike from his mind. Instead he gave himself over completely to Jenelle’s quick, clever hands, hot mouth, and lithe runner’s body.

He was so intoxicated from the beers he consumed and with her that he barely noticed a light pressure against his ankle a few minutes after Mike left. However, he could not ignore the iron grip of impossibly strong fingers around his knee, jerking him down under the water. Shocked, he swallowed and inhaled water, choking upon the lake and upon his terror, and he kicked out violently, trying to escape the grasp holding him under or injure whatever was holding him under, drowning him. For a split second, he wondered if it was Mike getting revenge for him making out with Jenelle right in front of his best friend who he knew had more than a crush on her, but that was ridiculous. The hand wrapped around his knee sharply pulled him down even deeper then released him, but that relief lasted only an instant before he felt those hard, strong fingers around his neck, squeezing then twisting. Dave felt a jolt, a flash of pain so intense his vision went white, and then he felt nothing at all.

Jenelle had no idea what happened to Dave - she only knew that he was touching her, kissing her, and then he jerked away from her, pulled down into the black water by some unknown force. She could see the bubbles of his screams floating up to burst silently upon the surface and the wild churning of the water where he had been that indicated he was struggling against  _ something. _ She reached down to grab his hand, but even though she knew that he was down there, somewhere just beneath her, she could not feel him, and she had no idea how deep the lake was here. An unfamiliar fear gripped her heart and her stomach in bloodied talons, squeezing ruthlessly, and no force in the world could have convinced her to stay behind a moment longer - not even to try to save her longtime friend and would-be lover. Despite the terror leaching panic and adrenaline into her bloodstream with every thudding beat of her racing heart, she swam for the dock with strong, sure strokes.

She just had to get out of the water. If she got out of the water and onto dry land, she was certain that she could outrun whatever had dragged Dave under, assuming that it was something that  _ could  _ leave the lake to chase after her. She reached the dock more quickly than she expected, skinning the knuckles of her right hand upon one of the old pilings supporting the weathered boards, the pain jolting like electricity through her but not slowing her from pulling herself up onto the span. She did hesitate when she realised her towel was not where she had left it, and she took the time to pick up the lantern and look back toward the lake and Dave. She saw him floating upon his belly, but she realised something was horribly  _ wrong _ before her brain could make sense of what her eyes saw out there in the black water. Dave  _ was _ floating upon his stomach, but somehow his face was twisted around to stare sightlessly up at the sky.

Jenelle screamed, the sound carrying over the water, even as she slid her bare feet into her sneakers and started to run, not taking the time to grab her clothes. Whatever could have pulled Dave under and twisted his head around 180 degrees, she did not want it to do the same to her. There were more clothes and towels  _ and weapons _ back at the tents. She looked back over her shoulder and saw a shape that looked like a man leaving the lake, which inspired her to run even faster.

The masked killer paused to watch the blonde girl race into the woods as he strode, dripping, out of the lake, the lantern swinging from her hand bouncing crazily off the thick trees and casting mad shadows to mark her passage. She was quite quick, he noted, but he was unconcerned by her speed. She was the last of the interlopers remaining to stain his land with her presence, and she, too, would be dead soon enough. With no thought in his mind beyond her imminent demise, Jason plunged into the woods after her.

Jenelle ran. She ran like the hounds of Hell followed hot upon her heels. If she could make it to the campsite, then she could grab the keys and Mike and Lainey and Frank, and they could all get to the truck and the guns and kill the motherfucker who just killed Dave … 

_ Oh god, Dave! _

Jenelle felt a stabbing pain in her side and each breath burned down her throat and into her lungs, stinging like rubbing alcohol poured into cuts, but she only lengthened her stride in response. She could not think about Dave anymore or even about the monster that was probably following her - she just had to get back to her friends. 

She could not help it, it was an irresistible force, and it forced her to do it - to make the stupid, foolish mistake of looking back over her shoulder to see if the figure from the lake actually  _ was _ following her. At first she thought maybe it … he … was not, because she heard nothing but her own heartbeat hammering in her ears and her own feet crunching through the dessicated corpses of summer’s leaves that littered the trail, but then she saw a shadow moving behind her. Moonlight glinted off his strange, white face.

_ A mask! _

She gasped, terrified.

_ How could it be so close behind her? _

And that was when she stumbled.

Over something large.

And fell forward onto her hands and knees, hitting the ground hard.

Jenelle pulled herself up even though her palms stung and her ankle and both knees ached now, her lungs burned, the scrape across her knuckles throbbed, and her head pounded with the gasping rhythm of her respiration. Then she swung the lantern over and glanced at what had tripped her.

Not what, but who - she had tripped over  _ someone  _ not  _ something _ .

“MIKE!” she shrieked, her voice higher-pitched than she had ever heard it, recognising that it was he lying across the trail, and she had tripped over  _ him _ , his still, unmoving  _ body, _ and she fell again.

Jenelle scrabbled backward like a crab until her back and head came into contact with a tree trunk. She shrieked again at the rough texture of bark catching in her short hair, rubbing against bare skin and the silent shadow looming ever larger as it came ever closer. Somehow, she managed to pull herself to her feet, and set out at a dead out run again, not realising that she was crying even though the tears were streaking across her cheeks and into her already-sodden hair. Through the blurring veil of tears, she saw the bright green of their tents, and relief flooded through veins that flowed with battery acid into muscles that threatened to cramp at any moment.

“Lainey! Grab the keys! We’ve gotta go! NOW! LAINEY! FRANK! C’MON!”

In her panicked hurry, she failed to notice that they had allowed the fire to burn down to almost nothing as she raced past it. But she skidded to a stop barely a moment later when she saw Frank collapsed in a pitiful, twisted heap just outside of the tent, his naked body nearly bisected and stained dark and awful.

“Oh god, oh no, oh god, LAINEY! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU WE GOTTA GO!”

But Lainey never answered, so Jenelle resumed running.

Jason could see the running girl pause at the campsite, her pale body glowing ruddy in the fading light of the dying fire, and he heard her frantically calling for her dead friends, grimly satisfied that they would not answer her. Despite her speed, he was catching up, and he was content in his certainty that she could not run forever - and he would be there when she faltered in exhaustion to dispatch her to wherever the dead of Crystal Lake went.

Jenelle tried to remember which way they had hiked from the truck to set up their camp, which path led to escape, and she decided to take the trail that looked broadest, assuming that had to be the correct one since they had hiked in carrying the tents, their packs, and everything else, so they would have needed some space.

_ Oh fuck, the guns. _ _ Were they even  _ in _ the truck? The guys moved everything to the blind, didn’t they? But would they have moved the guns there, as well? And what about the keys? _ She had no idea who had them last much less where they might be now. The weight of horrifying despair crashed down onto her shoulders, dragging her down with it.

“I can’t give up! I’ve gotta keep going! I can’t die! I got into Dartmouth AND Princeton! I can’t fucking die! Not like this … not here! I can’t die now!” ran like a mantra through her head, distracting her from the almost agonising sensation of her muscles straining as she tried to push through the cramps stiffening them, knowing she could not stop, not even long enough to vomit up the beer and vodka sloshing in her stomach.

The weight of the lantern, slight though it was, became too much to bear, so she let it fall from her tingling fingers and just ran blindly through the dense forest, trusting her feet and the faint luminance of the crescent moon to guide her through the cloying darkness. Dropping that slight burden proved enough to give her a second wind, and she took full advantage of it, digging in deeper and harder than she ever had, harder than she had thought she could, flat out sprinting along a trail that barely even existed, desperate to put as much distance between her vulnerable body and the threatening shadow still following behind her. Another two hundred yards, and she saw the edge of the forest approaching, the placid black lake coming into view reflecting pallid moonlight back. For a moment she thought she might have gone in a circle somehow, that the shadow was herding her back to where Dave’s corpse floated, waiting for her to join him in death, but she did not see the decrepit dock. Instead, she saw an even more decrepit building looming over the water, only a hundred more yards ahead. Her heart soared, hope beating back the despair weighing her down with resolute fists, and she felt like she was flying along the path that sloped down toward the lake and shelter. 

A place to hide from Death. 

Before she knew it, she was there. Jenelle leapt through the unglazed window like when she was running hurdles at a track meet, her feet and legs barely missing the shards of glass still sticking up like teeth from the rotting frame, then she skidded into the adjacent wall, unable to stop herself in time. She barely felt the impact through the adrenaline.

Looking around the old boathouse, she regretted dropping the lantern. The roof had a large hole on the far side, though, which let in the slightest hint of moonlight. Her eyes finally adjusted somewhat to the dim light, and she saw a row of wooden paddles lining the wall. She darted over and yanked one down, totally unbothered by the cobwebs that clung to it and her hands. It might not be much of a weapon against something that could cut people nearly in half and twist a man’s head around 180 degrees, but it was something. Relief crashed down and through her, and although she felt real hope, she doubled over and vomited out everything that had been in her stomach.

When she raised her head, panting and spitting to try to get the foul taste out of her mouth, she heard heavy footsteps just outside. Panic raised itself like a wild animal lunging and snapping within her again, and she searched desperately for somewhere to hide.

During the entirety of her desperate race against fate, the masked killer kept the girl’s fleeing form in sight, and when he saw her hurdle into the boathouse his lips, such as they were, twisted into what for him passed for a smile. It was almost done. Not even short of breath, he stalked around the decaying structure, no longer bothering to hide the sound of his footsteps upon rotted wood. She was already dead - she just did not know it yet. Truly, she had been dead from the moment she hiked into this forest.

_ It was time to finish it. _

Jenelle crouched in the darkest corner behind a pile of unidentifiable detritus undoubtedly left behind when the structure was abandoned many years earlier, gripping the paddle like a club in both hands, listening to the heavy tread of the fiend’s feet just outside of her hiding place, trying to calm her rapid breathing and shaking limbs. Now that she was still, the chill of the autumn night air bit into her over-exerted body, the sensation of the slick layer of sweat beaded upon her exposed flesh prickly as it formed into droplets that slid down her skin like icy needles, raising goosebumps along the lines of their passage and reminding her that she had left her clothes behind on the dock. Waiting for the masked killer, naked but for her running shoes, hoping beyond hope that he would think she had kept running and continue to follow the path instead of searching inside the old boathouse, she felt more exposed than ever in her life. She tried not to think about her friends and how horribly they had died, but every time she blinked she saw Dave’s corpse floating with his head turned all the way around, Mike’s crumpled form lying limp and motionless across the trail, Frank’s shattered leg held fast in the silvered steel mouth of a  _ fucking bear trap  _ with splinters of white bone sticking out through macerated flesh, gleaming wet and splashed with red in the orange glow of a dying fire, all the horror of the night seemingly imprinted upon the insides of her eyelids. But she realised she had not seen Lainey’s body amidst the chaos of any of the murder scenes. 

_ Maybe she had escaped the carnage with the truck keys, and even now she was coming back with the police to rescue her from the psycho chasing her! _

But how could Lainey have escaped the killer? Jenelle had run faster than in any meet or training, faster than she thought her body could go, and she had barely managed to increase her lead. Lainey had never been close to being able to keep up with her, not on any distance. But maybe while the killer was busy with Frank? As much as she wanted to believe it possible, Jenelle doubted it, but she just could not give up her hope that maybe Lainey survived the killing spree, no matter how unlikely that she could have escaped when three strong, athletic guys had been butchered. Still more tears threatened to leak from her eyes, but she was unable to bring herself to relinquish even one hand on the paddle to knock them away.

Her head filled with warring hope and despair, Jenelle waited, praying to every god she had ever heard of that her friends’ killer would move on instead of searching for her in the boathouse.

Then the door  _ shattered _ upon its hinges, splinters of wood and dust flew through the air like tiny missiles, and when the shadow stepped into the building, it was all she could do not to scream. It … he … looked massive, nearly filling the doorway, and renewed terror assaulted her. She could taste her frantic heartbeat upon her tongue, bitter as bile. The killer strode to the middle of the room, and as he passed beneath the hole in the roof, the light glinted off the long blade he carried, and all she could do was watch, frozen by horror. Barely able to breathe, smothering beneath her fear, Jenelle pressed herself further back into the concealing darkness.

Behind his mask, the little bit remaining of Jason’s nostrils flared, taking in the stink of decay overlaid with sour vomit, the tingling sting of alcohol, and the familiar stench of fear’s sweat. He stood completely, perfectly still in the centre of the dimly illuminated space and listened. Over the familiar sounds of his breath through the holes of his mask and his own slow, steady heartbeat, he detected the faint noise of irregular, shallow breathing.

_ There _ .

Jenelle watched in mute horror as the hulking brute, who had stood so still he resembled a statue in the middle of the room, turned toward where she crouched behind the pile of junk. Her heart fluttered in her throat as if trying to take flight to escape the doom headed her way. There was no way he could see her in the shadows, absolutely no way! So why was he coming toward her with such purpose in his long stride? 

She could not have known that sight was the weakest of his nearly preternaturally acute senses, and even if she were aware of this, there was nothing that knowledge could have done to help her.

Without even knowing it, she scooted back a pace, her sneakers quiet against the dust-strewn floor, but Jason heard her.

Jenelle blinked, and in that brief time, the man in the mask somehow reached the junk pile. When her eyes opened, his shadow was enveloping her and his broad back blotted out the scant light filtering through the hole in the roof. His arm rose, and the long, bloodstained blade in his hand usurped the entirety of her vision.

Jason swept aside the pile of lumber and shingles behind which the girl was attempting to conceal herself from him with an offhand, nearly lazy gesture, swinging the machete at her from the other side almost simultaneously. The girl sprang to her feet, parrying the blow that would have severed her head from her body with the paddle.

The force of the man’s swing almost tore the paddle from her sweating, shaky hands, but somehow she kept her grip upon it, and the machete blade skittered harmlessly along its shaft, just barely missing her numbly tingling fingers. 

“Why?” she shouted at him as tears filled her eyes and spilled down her face again, smearing streaks of black kohl down her cheeks to mark their passage.

She did not wait at all before swinging the blade of the paddle at his head; however, he was so much taller than Jenelle that it struck the stone-solid muscle of his shoulder instead with enough force that the shaft snapped with an explosive crack that sounded like thunder in an electrical storm, right at the machete’s point of impact. He barely even seemed affected by the blow that should have numbed his arm.

Jenelle screamed up at him in impotent fury, “What do you want?”

But the man towering over her said nothing.

She saw the muscles of his arm bunch beneath his stained and tattered work shirt, and she knew that he was about to deliver the killing blow. With a speed she did not know she possessed, she jabbed the jagged end of the broken paddle at his midsection, aiming at the unprotected area just below his sternum.

Jason easily caught the remains of the paddle with his free hand before it could make contact with his body, wrenching it from the girl’s hands. Before she could say anything, before she could  _ do  _ anything, he shoved the sharp length of wood up into the triangle of her jaw at the underside of her chin with such force that he lifted her up off her feet, her legs kicking weakly over a foot above the pool of blood steadily growing upon the floor beneath her, and the jagged end of the broken paddle burst through the top of her skull.

After a bit, slowly, almost gently, he lowered his arm and allowed her body to slip to the floor before putting a booted foot on her chest and jerking the shaft of the paddle out of her skull.

Jason felt almost nothing when he looked at the young body sprawled awkwardly on the floor amidst the junk at his feet, no elation, no remorse, nothing except a sense of completion, and of relief. The threat that the bad, irresponsible trespassers posed to his domain was finally neutralised. Now, all that remained was to dispose of the bodies.

  
  



	4. Evensong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Criticism always welcome!

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter IV: Evensong**

Almost three miles away from where five reckless teenagers had just paid the ultimate price for their unwise choice of hunting locations and irresponsible behaviour, at the opposite end of the wooded, lakefront property that once was a children’s summer camp, Jayne could feel the exhaustion of her several days of driving and sleeping in the cramped front seat of the tiny hatchback tugging upon her, trying to pull her under. Not having realised at any point since her arrival at Crystal Lake that she was not the only person there, she remained blissfully unaware of the absolute carnage so near to her neat little campsite or that she had already been spotted by the architect of those gruesome deaths.

“I’ll just finish the chapter, then it’s bedtime,” she reassured her mutinous eyelids that kept trying to fall closed as she continued reading.

It only took her a few more minutes of fighting her still-insubordinate eyelids to reach the end of the chapter, and even though she would have preferred to continue reading, she was true to her promise to them - truly, they forced her to keep her promise by being all but impossible to keep open. Closing the book with a quiet thump, she balanced it upon the armrest behind her elbow and gripped the armrests tightly to push her stiff body up out of the chair. To her alarm, the momentum sent her staggering forward a pace, but through a rapid series of minuscule muscle movements and adjustments, Jayne managed to catch her balance before falling face-first into the dying fire.

Bemoaning the clumsiness her arthritis coupled with stiff, aching muscles caused while staring wide-eyed into the campfire into which she just came so close to stumbling and falling, she breathlessly gasped “Oh, hellfuck!” in absolute shock.

_ That was too damned close for comfort. _

_ Was there  _ nothing  _ she could do right _ ?

_ And what else was going to go wrong before whatever forces control existence finally tired of their weary plaything, finally decided they were bored of toying with her, finally had their fill of her misery upon which they supped voraciously as if her agony, both of the emotional and physical sort, were a delicacy - and she feared that their appetite for her suffering might  _ _ never _ _ be sated - before they finally cast her aside and allowed her to tumble into the blessed, black oblivion and nothingness that awaits after life is extinguished _ ?

At least she  _ hoped _ only blackness and oblivion came after death. Reincarnation terrified her, because the thought of having to endure yet another lifetime where she could be forced to pay for her mistakes in this one was outright nauseating. Jayne had no hope that another life would be anything but being forced to re-enter the ring, flung to the mat and compelled to go another round with the awful twins, agony and despair, made to fight even though she would not … indeed, could not win. The concept of an afterlife was not any more comforting, even if she were destined to some unearthly paradise constructed along the lines of what Christians call “Heaven” (which seemed extremely unlikely to Jayne - if there were a supreme deity out there, it appeared to take pleasure in the tortures she endured; if it did not enjoy her suffering, it would not force so much upon her, right? So, obviously, it would not send someone it delighted in tormenting to Paradise, she reasoned), if she retained anything of herself once there, if she had any memories from this current existence, then Heaven would be Hell. And, if those “places” truly exist, she must be bound for the latter; nothing else made sense. So she hoped that any religions with an afterlife were wrong.

To be trapped with the memories of everything that had happened to her, everything that had been done to her, and all the pain she had endured,  _ for all eternity _ ? Her fear of  **that** was the only thing that had prevented her from taking her life before now. But Jayne knew that the end was rushing ever closer, that her body could not sustain life much longer, not even with all of the medications meant to keep her organs functioning and tame her immune system’s drive to destroy, and she dreaded the very likely possibility of her dying turning into one last drawn-out period of prolonged agonies. All she wanted was for her suffering to end.

Jayne’s mind drifted to the main subject of the tales that had brought her to Camp Crystal Lake - the protagonist, if that were the proper term for such a figure, for a serial killer, a revenant, a creature that was once a deformed little boy who died by drowning on his eleventh birthday but came back, only to die again and again, over and over, and yet somehow to be forever denied the peace and finality that is supposed to go along with death. A shudder of horror wracked her skinny frame.

_ Were there many fates much worse than Jason Voorhees’, were those tales true? _

She did not want to try to imagine any such thing. In a way, she felt relieved that nothing she had seen in the abandoned camp implied that there was any truth to the story that Jason had ever been resurrected after he drowned as a child - such was not a fate she would wish upon anyone - even though she had made the long, strenuous and uncomfortable drive to New Jersey in hope of finding that the stories of the masked murderer who haunted the forest were true so that she could be his next victim. To be unable to die and stay dead forever was the worst thing her fertile imagination could conceive.

Just as she had sat too still and for too long at the end of the dock, she knew she had sat too still and for too long in the folding camp chair before the fire while reading, and she heaved a weary sigh of frustrated resignation before turning to pick up the book and bring it back under the tarp to rejoin its siblings in their stack. Spending a couple hours sitting by a campfire reading  _ should not  _ be a dangerous activity, and that she had come so close to injury thereby was a slap in the face, more than merely disappointing, proof that there was something wrong with her - and the something that so undeniably was wrong with her was not just her physical ailments. They were a symptom, not the underlying cause, of that she felt absolutely certain. All Jayne really wanted to do was to curl up in her blankets and sleep, but she knew she should get changed and that she  _ had  _ to take her medications. Honestly, she was aware that she should eat something, as well, but her previously nonexistent appetite had diminished even further thanks to her little stumble. Even though her vehicle was only a few yards away from the tarp, she picked up her walking stick to use in aiding her balance as she limped over to Rodney.

She sighed again when she opened the hatchback and realised that her bag of clothes was buried at the very bottom of the pile of camping gear and the bits of potentially useful detritus she retained from the life she had abandoned.

“Fuck it, I’ll just sleep in my clothes tonight,” she muttered under her breath, her irritation mounting.

_ Maybe she would find her missing shovel while rummaging around in there in the morning,  _ she thought, searching for something positive upon which she could focus just as her therapists always encouraged her to do, although she did not have much hope of it showing up. She could swear that she had stabbed the shovel into the dirt beside the fire pit after she finished constructing it and left it there before she left her campsite in search of the infamous, supposedly cursed lake.

Although she had given up on digging out her bag of clothes, she decided to grab the camping shower she had picked up on a whim for just in case her trip’s purpose took longer than she anticipated to effect, along with her sneakers. The terrain here was easier, flatter than she had been expecting (“ _You really ought to’ve checked a topographical map before heading out, Jaynie-bug,”_ she could almost hear her father chiding her. _“It’s important to prepare oneself as thoroughly as possible for everything one intends to do - and I know you hate hearing it, but you know that goes double for you, fragile li’l bug that you are._ ”), so her old tennies should suffice, and they were much more comfortable than the jungle boots. Tying the frayed ends of the laces together in a loop that would be easy to unknot even with her frustratingly stiff and shaky fingers, she hung the pair of black converse lo-tops over her shoulder, freeing one hand to grip the walking stick. She did not particularly want to, but she resigned herself to having to make a second trip to the car to grab one of her water jugs.

Once she had brought everything she needed back to the tarp and locked up the car (she doubted anyone was around to steal from it, but her shovel  _ did _ seem to be missing, so she felt the need to be cautious), Jayne plopped down beside her pile of blankets and pulled the lockbox where she kept her pill bottles out from beneath them. She only had to take out five of the bottles at night as opposed to eight in the morning, so twisting off the caps and replacing them was slightly less of a chore, at least.

Finally finished with her nightly routine, she went to bank the fire in its pit, not wanting to be responsible for a disaster should any of the dead leaves picked up by the night breeze float through the flames and carry them into the dry underbrush that grew so thickly around the old camp, then she retreated back to the tarp. Spreading out the blankets then wrapping them around herself, she curled up in a ball and sleep claimed her almost immediately.

—

—

At the same time, while Jayne was pulling the largest of the partially burnt limbs out of the fire and spreading a layer of ashes over the glowing coals, Jason was sitting upon a thick branch of a gnarled old red oak about eight feet above the ground with the body of the first boy he had killed that night, wrapping a thick metal cord around its intact ankle that attached to a pulley system triggered by a series of three lines crossing the path below. If anything weighing more than the majority of the area’s wildlife stepped upon or into any of the lines, the corpse would swing down from the branch by its ankle, its face hanging exactly 5’5” off the ground. Although he had no measuring stick, the killer knew that his calculations were accurate. And if the startled trespasser should step back to either side in their shock at being confronted by the mutilated body rushing at them from above, they would likely find a foot caught in the steel jaws of one of the pair of bear traps he had positioned and disguised there - just as the dead boy had when he stepped out of his tent. Once he was certain that the cord would hold, he dropped from the branch, landing lightly on his feet despite the height of the branch and his weight, and then he intentionally triggered the mechanism. He was not surprised when the corpse swung down from the branch exactly as he had intended when he rigged up the system, having used similar setups for many years now. 

Rather than grabbing it, Jason patiently waited until the body stopped swinging on its own, then he reached up to grasp the branch overhead and easily pulled himself up onto it again, expertly balancing himself as he crouched upon the twisted limb then using the cord to pull the corpse back up, replacing it in the exact same position as before. He inspected the cord and the ankle around which it was wrapped, nodding in grim satisfaction at their condition before leaping down with the grace of a wild panther and landing perfectly silently upon the dry leaves carpeting the ground.

Having finally completed his task, making good use of the last of the night’s bodies, the killer felt the satisfaction of a job well done flow through him, feeling a sense distantly akin to peace though it did nothing to warm his cold, mostly-dead body. He knew that there were no other trespassers about as his mother’s insistent whispers to kill - a sound to which he had grown so accustomed over the years that it mingled with the sounds of his heartbeat and his breathing, just another part of him and barely noticeable unless he disobeyed - had fallen silent the moment he pierced the running blonde girl’s brain pan with the broken oar she had tried and failed to use to defend herself against him. Although another had survived, only one girl had ever  _ truly _ defended herself against him after the Jarvis boy dragged him out of the quiet calm of his grave. Jason shook his head, trying to clear his mind of the unpleasant memories of the little blonde girl who had dredged him out of the lake where Tommy Jarvis had chained him, then proceeded to use some awful, invisible force to beat him, hang him, stab him with nearly a dozen nails, set him on fire, then try to blow him up before having him dragged back into the lake again to wait until some other fool had ignored the curse upon the land and brought him back. He had never faced anything like that wretched blonde girl before, and he hoped he never would again. Tina Shepard might have been no more than a little slip of a girl, but she was a monster, too.

Unlike Tina and Tommy, though, at least it had been easy to kill the third person who resurrected him - and the full force of the land’s curse that he enforced - from the depths. Jason chose to focus upon the memory of killing the bearded old man in black and green robes instead, how he had ripped the man’s arm from its socket and beaten him to death with it even as he bled out the moment he waded out from the water, much preferring that to his memories of tangling with the Shepard girl. Unbidden, another strange girl came to mind even as he was remembering the strange, unintelligible words the bearded man had been chanting in some language that sounded inhuman to Jason’s unstudied but sensitive hearing before he began blubbering and pleading for his life in plain English - the skinny little child-woman he had found sitting on the edge of the dock.

Almost without thinking, he found himself walking upon the trail that led to the campsite he assumed was hers, wanting to see if he could possibly learn anything more about the new intruder from observing her at her camp. Though he walked at what he considered a leisurely pace, it took him little time to cross almost the entire camp property he haunted before reaching the tidy little campsite he assumed that the girl had set up for herself. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, just another of the many silent shadows surrounding it, and looked around intently. The first thing to catch his eye was the properly-banked fire and the folding camp chair placed at a safe distance from the fire pit. Then a hint of movement from beneath the tarp drew his gaze, and he saw two neat piles of gear and the stack of books off to one side and a lumpy pile of blankets in the middle beneath the peak of the tarp. He wondered where the girl was, though. 

Even though it was the pile of blankets that had moved, coaxing his attention toward what lay beneath the bright blue plastic canopy, it took him a moment to realise that the girl was buried beneath them or curled up amongst them, somehow making herself improbably small as she slept. He studied the pile of blankets for several minutes, mostly pondering what to do about her, but enough of his attention was focused upon her to notice that the blankets moved at irregular intervals, and it did not appear to him that the movement was caused by her body shifting positions beneath them, but rather it looked more as if she were experiencing spasms in her sleep. It was a notable detail, but he doubted that it had any real significance. He decided that the most likely cause was just dreams causing her body to twitch as she slept, so he dismissed it from the forefront of his thoughts, although it was filed away somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind along with all of the likely-useless information he collected about his victims just by observing them prior to killing them. No two trespassers ever had behaved exactly the same and none of them had ever responded to him in  _ exactly  _ the manner he predicted, although he was exceptionally skilled at reading their bodies’ micro-movements and anticipating with a high albeit not perfect degree of accuracy how they might react.

Much more significant to him was the fact that his mother still remained silent, not telling him what to do about the girl’s presence where he knew she did not belong.

Well, despite how incredibly unwise, reckless, and indeed irresponsible it seemed to him that she had chosen to go camping at Crystal Lake given his presence and the curse within and over the land itself that he personified, he could find no fault in the obvious care she had demonstrated via how she set up the site - or indeed in any of her behaviour he had observed thus far. He had seen no evidence of bottles or cans of alcohol when he had looked into her car earlier and, unlike the five teenagers whose blood still literally stained his gloved hands, there were no empty containers of alcohol strewn across her campsite. Furthermore, as far as he could tell, she was quiet, and the entire setup of her campsite was designed to be minimally impactful upon the land. Perhaps that was why his mother’s voice that always urged him to kill just about anyone and everyone reckless enough set foot upon the former camp property was quiet in his head despite the girl’s very unwelcome presence. It made little sense to him, but he decided he could ignore her for the night. As long as she packed up and left tomorrow. She might not appear to be the typical irresponsible thrill-seeker who visited Camp Crystal Lake, but that was even more reason she absolutely did  _ not _ belong here.

As he turned away from where the girl slept and melted back into the forest, he decided that if she had not packed her gear into her rickety little car and gone on her way to anywhere else by the next afternoon, then he would have to make sure that she left. It would be much easier on her if she just left on her own.

  
  



	5. Insignificant

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter V - Insignificant**

When Jayne woke up the next day in the blue-stained light beneath the tarp, she experienced a paralysing moment of disorientation before she remembered where she was, why she was sleeping curled up in a pile of blankets upon the ground, and what a strange ground it was that crinkled noisily beneath her like crumpled up plastic as she shifted positions. It had been far too long since last she had slept so soundly, and her mind seemed to be having a moment’s difficulty returning to her current reality. Quickly though, it all came back to her - how she had disposed of the majority of her possessions, left her life behind in every sense of the phrase, made the long drive up to New Jersey, and finally reached her destination: the allegedly cursed summer camp that, according to legend, was haunted by the vengeful figure of a boy who had drowned in the lake back in 1957 then somehow grew up to be a nigh-unstoppable killing machine who Anna had told her about as a campfire ghost story ten years before. Jayne stretched out with a yawn, disentangling her limbs from the blankets in which she had wrapped herself like some sort of smooshed human burrito so that she would not get too cold during the night to sleep, then sat up stiffly with a low groan before peering out from beneath the tarp. To her shock, the sun was already high in the sky, dappling the ground with the dancing shadows cast by its light passing through the trees. She knew that she had been thoroughly worn out by the time she curled up in her blankets and fell asleep last night after the days she had spent driving all the way from southeastern Louisiana up to rural New Jersey all by herself with only the stereo and her pain for company and then the effort of setting up her simple campsite. However, she rarely slept well or for long, regardless of how exhausted she might be, so managing to sleep past 9 a.m. as she so clearly had was a rarity. It felt good, though; very good, in fact, and she stretched her arms up over her head and arched her back with another broad yawn, just enjoying the fresh, clean air surrounding her. Inhaling deeply, she savoured the crisp flavour of Fall carried upon the light breeze sneaking into her shelter, especially after having awakened for the past few days to the choking stink of exhaust, burnt oil, and mildew that permeated the car in which she had been sleeping during her journey.

Still seated upon the crinkling blue plastic ground cover, she folded up the blankets and stacked them neatly beside her stack of books, then took her morning doses of all her medications before hiding the lockbox in which she stored the pill bottles between the blankets. She resented the reminder that the white-capped, orange containers were of how even though she had reached the destination about which she had dreamt and for which she had longed more and more over the course of the decade after she first heard of it and its tragic, blood-soaked history, being there had not changed her at all. Not even one little bit. She was still just as sick and broken and ugly and wrong here as she was everywhere else despite the beauty and vibrancy surrounding her; her body still needed the medications she hated taking but could not skip taking or else it would do far worse to her than it did every day. 

Some of that wave of bitterness receded when getting up proved to be less difficult than she feared it might be after the stiffness that had plagued her the previous day whenever she remained still for more than a few minutes, much to her relief. Using her walking stick for balance but barely limping at all, she went to Rodney and found her teakettle. Seeing a hint of a smile upon her face in the distorted reflection upon the curved side of the teakettle came as a rather pleasant surprise, and her smile only widened. It took very little effort to coax the banked campfire into flames again with the addition of a bit more pine straw and two of the previous night’s partly-burnt branches, and in a very short time she was settled upon the folding chair beside the fire waiting for the water to boil so she could enjoy a hot cup of tea. She could not recall the last time she had felt so relaxed, so peaceful, and she silently thanked Anna for telling her the story of Camp Crystal Lake.

_ A cursed place should not be so beautiful or induce such profound calm _ , she thought.

With a sense of nostalgia settling upon her, Jayne found herself wishing the trees back home would have exploded in such a fiery blaze of colour in the Fall, but it always seemed as if the interminable, wet heat of Summer gave way directly to Winter in the southern swamps, the leaves adorning the trees immediately shifting, seemingly overnight, from brilliant shades of green to muted browns, the vibrant trees suddenly becoming bare and dead. Fall in southeastern Louisiana lasted barely a week, if the inhabitants of that marshy realm were lucky. The region certainly had its charm, and New Orleans in particular was a jewel of a city … well, a cracked and filthy jewel, marred with potholes large enough to swallow Rodney and stinking of rancid beer, stale vomit, and piss wherever the tourists congregate en masse, but a jewel nonetheless, with its fresh seafood, multicultural cuisine, and historical architecture. As for Jayne’s hometown of Pontchatoula, it was nationally famous for the size and sweetness of its strawberries. Not even the vast agricultural fields of California could compete with the quiet, small town less than an hour from the sybaritic Crescent City.

The whistling of the kettle appeared to disturb the birds in the surrounding forest, their calls suddenly ringing sharp and insistent from the trees until she removed the offending object from the fire and poured its boiling contents over the little hand-packed bag of dried and coarsely-ground spearmint, ginger root, orange spice, lemon peel, and chamomile in her mug then poured in a generous amount of thick, dark honey. It sounded like a strange mixture even to her, but she found it helped to settle her stomach in the morning, so she had endured the commingling of strong, disparate flavours until with familiarity she actually grew to like it. Surrounded by the pristine peace of the wilderness that her body hungrily absorbed, with the ever-present ache of her swollen joints reduced to an uncharacteristically dull nagging in the background, and with her slightly gnarled and twisted fingers warmed by the mug of steaming tea clutched between her hands and her upturned face similarly warmed by the Autumn sun, Jayne felt a deep sense of contentment that she had long ago given up on ever again experiencing.

_ Today would be a good day _ .

It was extremely rare for her to feel hunger until she had been awake for several hours, which she viewed as something of a blessing because her stomach typically rebelled against the introduction of anything but tea until then; however, to her surprise, when her mug was still almost half-full, she heard the rumble of her empty tummy calling her attention to the faint pangs of hunger. It made sense, though - she realised that she had eaten nothing at all after the ice cream sandwich and a handful of goldfish crackers she bought at a truck stop to serve as her lunch shortly before noon yesterday.  _ Oops _ . The sense of calm contentment she was enjoying faded as she nervously contemplated what she might eat, fearful that her stomach would reject anything she put in it, no matter how bland, thereby ruining what she hoped would be a good day.

Leaving her chair, she dug through the supplies in the back of Rodney, trying to decide between a can of condensed chicken broth and some strawberry applesauce, and finally settled upon the applesauce because it seemed more like breakfast food. While she sat beside the fire, slowly licking the applesauce off her spoon, she tried to figure out what she should do once she finished, assuming that breakfast did not make her too sick to accomplish much more than curling up beneath the tarp clutching her tummy and trying not to vomit as morning meals so often did. After several days out upon the road, she almost desperately wanted a shower, so she decided that the first order of business would be setting up the camping shower she had purchased. Plus, getting water for it gave her an excuse to go down to the lake again … not that she really needed an excuse to return there. All she could see was its beauty despite what she knew of its tragic history.

Once she finished her small bowl of applesauce, Jayne remained seated for about ten minutes, waiting, sitting as still as she could hold herself and hoping that her stomach would not not decide to reject her breakfast. Surprisingly and fortunately, the small meal seemed to be sitting easily thus far, much to her relief. When she finally was almost completely certain that it would stay down, she banked the fire again then pulled the shower-contraption out from beneath the tarp and read through the instructions. It all seemed relatively straightforward, and in under an hour she had it rigged up, hanging from the thickest of the lower branches of one of the towering pin oaks encircling the clearing in which she had set up her campsite. Even though she doubted her ability to lift the 5-gallon reservoir off the ground much less over her head when filled, it seemed like it would not be too difficult to haul it up using the cord looped over the branch like a pulley for leverage. Carrying the water to fill it from the lake to her campsite, on the other hand … that would be the challenge. Simply carrying the reservoir to and from the lake to fill it as anyone else might have done was not feasible for her, but how much time would it take for her to haul enough water to fill it back and forth? Then she remembered that she had no schedule to follow, no deadlines to meet, so if it required her to make multiple trips to and from the lake to fetch enough water to fill it, so be it. Her stiff muscles could use the exercise, anyway, and she had always enjoyed walking through the woods.

After cleaning her bowl, spoon, and mug, she put them away and pulled two empty gallon-jugs out from the back of the car then changed out of the clothes she had worn for the past three days, trading the long-sleeved black T-shirt and leggings for a worn-thin, heathered grey T-shirt so loose the stretched-out neck tended to slip off her shoulder and down her arm, exposing one bony shoulder or the other but incredibly comfortable, and a pair of black cargo shorts that hung precariously off her jutting hip bones even with a belt to cinch in the waistband. She brushed out the mussed mess sleep had made of her wild curls before parting her hair down the middle and braiding it into a pair of pigtails, her fingers struggling with twisting the fine strands in the repeating pattern a bit less than usual, then slid her feet into her black and white converse sneakers, propping her feet upon the seat of her chair so she would not have to bend all the way down to tie the laces. Lastly, she strapped her knife in its sheath to her thigh and pulled on her holster, checking to make sure that the Kimber nestled within had a round in the chamber, ready to fire if necessary, before sliding the band into position upon her hip and buckling it securely in place. She could not have expressed precisely why, but she found the pressure of the handgun’s slight weight at her side immensely comforting, almost like a loved one’s hug. Except Jayne had never actually felt comfortable being hugged by anyone, not even by her parents. Finally ready, she set out for the lake, water jugs in hand, almost skipping.

On the way back to the campsite, weighed down as she was by both full jugs of water, she was very glad that the terrain was relatively flat. The jugs were not particularly heavy, even to her, but they affected her balance and, much to her frustration, the wrist she had broken several years earlier began to throb in protest before she made it even halfway back. Still she persevered, long accustomed to having to push through varying degrees of pain if she wanted to accomplish anything at all, and upon reaching her campsite she carefully poured the contents of each jug into the shower’s reservoir before returning to the lake to refill them. The second trek down to the lake took a little bit longer, and although it was cool outside, especially in the shade of the dark trees overhanging the remains of the trail, and a slight breeze ruffled the blazing leaves still clinging to the branches above, she felt a bit of sweat beading upon her forehead, and more trailing down her spine and along the shallow line between her breasts. Once she finished pouring the third and fourth gallons into the five-gallon tank, she paused to wipe the back of her forearm across her damp forehead, wondering if she really needed to go back to the lake for just one more gallon of water. It did not seem like it would make much of a difference, and she very nearly set aside both of the jugs, but then she considered just how ridiculously much hair she had, the unruly mop of waves and curls both long and thick, and her concern that she might not have enough water to rinse all the suds from her hair drove her to return to the lake for that last gallon of water which might just make all the difference.

Once she had filled the jug, she decided to stay at the lake for a little while, enjoying the warmth of the late Autumn sun and the faint caress of the breeze over her skin, absorbing the peace emanating from the clear, tranquil, blue-green water and the fiery blaze of leaves bedecking the dark trees surrounding it and reflected upon its glasslike surface. After all, there was nowhere else she needed to be. There was a particular beauty unique to such stark contrasts - flame and water, dying leaves and the living lake that contained the intrinsic power to kill - that captured her attention. Entranced, her senses were completely filled with the overwhelming calm, leaving her unaware that she was no longer alone beside the water, that she was being watched.

******

Jason had not been able to stop thinking about the peculiar girl whose age was so difficult to discern and whose unwelcome presence had not triggered his mother’s voice to ring inside his mind, insisting that he kill the trespasser, only able to ignore those unpleasant thoughts during the brief period while he dealt with the five drunken intruders. That inexplicable silence from his mother, who had begun nearly  _ screaming _ in his head almost immediately after he left the girl behind unscathed to hunt down the new trespassers, demanding that he must kill those irresponsible teens for her such a short time after she had failed to say anything at all about the small figure he had discovered seated at the end of the dock, coupled with the girl’s diminutive stature and scrawny build, led him to believe that the girl was a child, but children did not drive or carry handguns. It was perplexing, uncomfortable, and he did not like anything that did not fit snugly into the order he imposed over his existence. And the girl-woman-child did not. The only thing about her of which he was absolutely certain was that she did not belong at Camp Crystal Lake - aside from that, she and her presence and Mommy’s complete lack of a reaction to her confused him. Even when he had returned to his domain after the Jarvis boy resurrected him, however long ago that was, and found that the fools had dared to reopen the camp  _ to children _ , his mother had not been silent. No, his mother had demanded that he not harm any of the campers (not that he ever would intentionally hurt an innocent child; it simply was not in his nature - even though Jarvis had been young that first time they clashed, that boy had not been innocent, he had been able to sense that his mind was no longer fully a child’s; and besides, the irksome boy had gotten between him and his duty an unforgivable number of times that night, even before playing his cruel trick - in truth, Jason would have preferred not to have to kill anyone at all, and he yearned for the day to come when nobody would trespass upon his land so that he would never have to kill again) and warned him against killing where they would see if it were at all possible. The situation was too strange for him, and he longed for a return to the routine, predictable, simple normalcy of his routine, predictable, simple existence where everything followed the patterns he understood so well. He decided that he would give her until midday to pack up her belongings and leave on her own, but if she were still upon his land after that, he would ensure that she left, well aware of just how intimidating he was capable of being.

So, when the sun passed its highest point in the sky, Jason abandoned his patrolling of the forest and returned to the clearing in which she had set up her camp, hoping to find it deserted and empty of any signs of human habitation. Much to his consternation, though, the tarp was still strung up between the trees, faint curling trails of smoke arose from the fire pit where the coals of the banked fire still smouldered beneath their thin, protective coating of grey-white ash, the rusty little hatchback still sat where she had parked it, and there was even a new addition which he had not seen the previous times he inspected the site - some strange contraption of hoses and cords was now hanging from the lowest branch of one of the trees. Curious, he examined it, trying to discern its purpose. The large container at the base of the tree sloshed as if full of water when he prodded it with a boot-clad foot, and the tube extending from the bottom thereof terminated in something that resembled nothing more than a faucet, and he wondered if it might be a sprinkler of sorts, though what purpose that might serve for the girl while camping in the woods was beyond him. It was an interesting contrivance, certainly, and the part of his mind that was fascinated by the functioning of mechanical devices urged him to linger a while until he could figure out its purpose and function. However, he was not there to feed his curiosity, so he dismissed that desire.

With narrowed eyes, Jason stalked through the neat little campsite, searching for the girl herself, but although her things were there, she was not. Unbidden, a low growl of frustration vibrated within his chest when she failed to appear.  _ Why could nothing be simple where she was involved?  _ Grinding his teeth, he thought about how he first had seen her down at the lake, so he decided to continue his hunt for the girl there.

Although he was searching for her, so he probably ought to have been pleased to find his quarry so easily, all he felt when he saw the small figure sitting upon her heels at the end of the dock was anger paired with discomfort. Again, he noticed that his mother’s commanding voice in his head was strangely silent, and he did not like that one bit. In his mind, he asked her to tell him what he was supposed to do about the girl; however, Mommy never responded to him when he tried to address her, not even in the early years after her murder when he outright begged her to say anything to him,  _ anything at all  _ besides her hissed demands for death, and this situation was no different. Pausing at the foot of the dock to observe her, he took note of the full water jug sitting upon the grey-weathered boards beside her, the black-hilted knife in its black sheath strapped to her thigh camouflaged against the black of her shin-length shorts, and the bulge beneath her loose grey shirt at her hip that he knew concealed a handgun. Gritting his teeth behind his mask, Jason drew his machete with a softly hissing whisper of steel from the leather straps that held it secured to his thigh then stepped out onto the old wooden span over the water, this time doing nothing to disguise the sound of his footsteps.

At the sound of creaking wood and heavy footsteps approaching from behind her, Jayne sprang to her feet with a sharply indrawn breath and abruptly turned around to see who was there. Before she even had time for her eyes to register who was coming toward her, her left hand immediately went to her hip to release the snap then came to rest upon the .45 holstered at her waist, prepared to draw and fire in a single, smooth move she had practiced from half a dozen carry positions for several years until it was as much a part of her muscle memory as breathing. 

Maintaining awareness of her hand where it dropped to her handgun, Jason’s mismatched gaze nevertheless fixed upon the girl’s face, expecting to watch her mounting terror at his appearance write itself across her features.

Jayne’s green-flecked amber eyes went wide and her mouth gaped open soundlessly as she took in the sight of the the enormous masked man in ragged, dirt- and blood-stained clothing full of holes suspiciously reminiscent of bullet holes and the sort of tears made by blades thrust through the fabric into the flesh beneath, who had appeared behind her so suddenly and who now loomed threateningly over her, holding up a long, stained machete so comfortably that it appeared to be an extension of his thickly muscled arm. She was not sure what or who she had expected to see upon whirling around, but it was definitely not this … fearsome behemoth radiating deadly menace with his every heaving breath. She thought he was likely the tallest man she had ever seen, standing well more than a foot taller than her barely five foot - in shoes - stature.  _ No, he was probably closer to a foot and a half taller than she, maybe even more _ , she realised, and the spread of his shoulders seemed close to equalling her height. He looked like he could snap her bones with one large, gloved hand. She stared up at him, frozen in place at the sight of how he glared down at her with mismatched eyes - one dark and greenish and the other white as a blind man’s, the two set unevenly in his skull - from behind the chipped and marred old hockey mask that obscured his face, and she knew instinctively that this was the man from Anna’s stories. This was the boy who had drowned in Crystal Lake and been resurrected to wreak vengeance upon anyone foolish enough to trespass upon  _ his  _ land. This was the Camp Blood Killer in the flesh. Her chest ached when her pounding heart seemed to skip a beat, but she managed to force the words to leave her mouth.

“You ...” she murmured in breathless disbelief. “You’re real!”

At her softly uttered outburst, Jason expected the girl to draw her gun or try to run, so he readied himself to swing the machete and end her life should she choose to attack, but to his absolute shock, instead of pulling her handgun from its holster, she smiled radiantly up at him with what appeared to him to be  _ hope _ , of all the improbable expressions a face could wear, as opposed to the horror or fear he was accustomed to seeing upon faces upturned to his, and her left hand abandoned its position upon the handgun entirely, rising to flutter like a pale bird before her throat.

When his sole visible reaction to her exclamation seemed to be an additional tensing of the bulging muscles in the arm holding up the machete, the tip of her tongue darted out to lick her lips nervously, and she suddenly felt afraid that maybe she was mistaken - that maybe this was some other masked, machete-wielding giant of a man who just happened to be at the site of the former Camp Crystal Lake - and for the briefest moment she regretted having moved her hand away from the security represented by the Kimber. The stories she had found about Jason Voorhees were all quite specific as to what he did to his victims: he killed them. There were no tales of extended torture or rape committed by the Camp Blood Killer - from everything she had read, she gleaned that anyone who stood upon the ground where he and his mother had died so many years ago committed a crime in his eyes for which the penalty was a quick, violent death.

Which was precisely why Jayne had come to Crystal Lake.

She yearned for death to release her from her body and her memories, but she absolutely did not want her death to be drawn out - she had already suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes in her twenty-six years of life, and what she sought was an  _ end  _ to her suffering. But while her research led her to believe that the legendary killer would end her life relatively quickly without prolonging her last moments to enjoy her pain, playing with her as a house cat plays with a lizard for his own cruel amusement at her expense, she felt no such certainty about any other man she might encounter in the woods. Cold sweat slid down along the line of her spine, raising goose prickles in its wake as she tried not to think about the sorts of things strange men in the forest might do to a lone girl encountered far from where anyone could hear her screams or come to rescue her, before killing her, silencing her forever so she could not tell of the horrors perpetrated upon her during her last moments of life. The thought of dying with those images as the very last at the fore of her mind seemed almost as awful as actually suffering such a fate. So she clutched at her hope that all of her pain would soon be ended forever and addressed the menacing man standing before her.

“You are Jason Voorhees, right?” she asked in a thin, light, slightly scratchy voice only a hair above a whisper, and a shy, apologetic smile returned to light her pallid face just before she added, “I so hope you are.”

And  _ that _ was when the significance of the moment finally sank in, and she  _ understood. _ This was it. The end of everything. The end of the pain that never went away no matter how many damned painkillers she took. The end of the memories that haunted her. The end of the nightmares that did not end when she awakened twisted in wet sheets to a body damp with sweat and a face slick with tears, but which shifted into a reality that was less phantasmagorical but which was actually worse because it was  _ real _ and there was no waking up from it to escape … but it was the end of  _ everything.  _ It was the end of her suffering, but it was also the end of the odd joy she felt when she was alone in her car and a favourite song came on, inspiring her to sing along even though she had a thin, breathy voice that she felt ruined any song she tried to sing. It was the end of the bittersweet pleasure of losing herself in the novels she loved. She would never again awaken in pain so terrible she could not even drag her stiff, spasming body from the bed, but neither would she ever feel the thrill of riding her bike down the levee again, raising her feet off the pedals and lifting her hands off the brakes while the wind rushing past lifted her tangled, baby-fine curls off her back to wave like a banner of copper and gold in her wake. She would never again experience anything at all, good or bad.

The moment was so unlike the surreal morning almost a year before when the doctor flown in from Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta had breezed into the isolation room where they had her hooked up to several machines to tell her that there was nothing more they could do, that the infection was still spreading through her, wholly unresponsive to the cocktail of antibiotics they had pumped into her veins through the IVs over the past two weeks, and that there was no real chance of her living long enough even to see the sun rise the next morning, so if she had not yet made her peace, she probably should, as the time to do so was running out quickly … but, despite that prognosis, she  _ had _ seen the sun rise that next morning … and the one after that … and every other morning thereafter up to today … 

But this moment was  _ it _ . The true last moment. There was no uncertainty left. The upraised machete hovering over her would descend, bringing death and blessed oblivion with it. She wished that her life had not led her to this bleak moment, but she only felt regret that her existence had been so full of misery and pain that its ending had become her sole hope and most powerful desire.

Jayne waited for the blade to fall.

Though he could not speak, Jason might have nodded in response to her inquiry if he was himself, but he was too confused and shocked to do so.  _ Nobody  _ who came to Crystal Lake actually  _ wanted _ to encounter him, because to encounter him was to encounter their death. Perplexed by the girl’s unexpected and, to him, inexplicable response to seeing him, Jason’s boots remained frozen to the wooden planks where he stood, no more than an arm’s length away from her, and he cocked his head to the side as he took the opportunity to observe her from the front up close now that he could see her face for the first time.

Female beauty was irrelevant to him, so his assessment failed to determine if the girl were pretty or not; instead, he noticed her pallor and the dark shadows around her large eyes, which he recognised as indications of exhaustion or illness. Seeing her dark, coppery blonde hair, even pulled back as it was into a pair of long plaits that hung down to the bottom edge of her ribs over the loose, grey shirt covering her torso, stabbed him in the gut, reminding him again of his mother’s killer so many years dead, but the eyes looking up at him from her pale face with such inexplicable hope were a green speckled amber, wholly unlike Alice’s bright blue.  _ Hope _ , of all things … Jason truly could not understand it. When she swallowed, he could see the tendons and muscles moving beneath the pale skin of her throat and upper chest, hers a form made up of little more than muscle, sinew, and bone beneath easily bruised skin, but despite how little body fat she appeared to have, the curved line of protruding collarbone exposed by the neckline of her shirt sagging down onto her upper arm did not stick up any more than typical of the many other girls he had killed, telling him that she was not only short and skinny but also quite fine-boned; and therefore, she would be effortlessly easy for him to break.

However, what he still could not judge by his keen observation of her appearance was her age. Her body still told him that she was a child, her obvious familiarity with carrying a handgun implied that she was a grown woman, and he could not place her face into either category - when she smiled, he thought child, but she had appeared significantly older when she first turned to face him with her mouth set by nervousness in a grim line. All in all, she just confused him  _ more _ upon closer observation. He felt the urge to ask her who and what she was, why she had come to Camp Crystal Lake, and why she had appeared  _ relieved _ instead of terrified when she saw it was he who stood behind her, especially since she seemed to have some knowledge of who he was - and of whom or what was she so afraid that she was ready to draw a gun upon  _ them _ but not upon  _ him _ ? However, being effectively mute, he could not ask her these or any of the other questions buzzing around him like so many flies.

In the face of the imposing masked man’s continued unmoving, silent scrutiny, Jayne could feel her cheeks growing hot as a blush crept up over her face from her neck. She had never been comfortable with being the focus of attention, particularly male attention, and being glared at by a man a foot and a half taller than she whose entire body radiated menace so intense the air around him should have rippled with its heat as he observed her was more than unnerving. She could feel her fingers twisting as she nervously awaited the machete diving down to swing her way, so sharp the blade would split the molecules of the air in its passage before splitting her flesh, muscle, and bone, and finally put an end to the pain that had become her life over the past several years.  _ How bad would the pain of that blade entering her body be? How long would it hurt until oblivion would finally free her forever from pain’s clawed grasp? _ She watched him expectantly, hoping it would be quick.

For his part, Jason’s frustration at not being able to put the girl standing before him, gazing up at him with so much hope and with that improbable little smile, into any single one of the organised boxes into which he placed people, was rapidly building toward explosion within him. Standing there and staring at her was not providing him with answers to any of the questions he had about her, and he could  _ feel _ his frustration shifting back to rage, so he turned upon his heel and stalked away from her, still hoping she would just leave his woods on her own. Whatever she was, she  _ did not  _ belong here.

******

For several long moments after the silent, imposing man she presumed to be the legendary killer who haunted the abandoned summer camp turned and walked away from her, leaving her unharmed, Jayne stood frozen to the spot, watching the large figure’s retreat until the dark shadows of the forest swallowed up the last traces of him. She did not understand what had just happened, but when it finally dawned upon her that he was not going to kill her, hot tears welled up from within, filling her eyes and blurring the trees into which he had vanished.

It was so wrong - Anna’s story, everything she had read, all the sources agreed that Jason was absolutely merciless, that he killed  _ everyone  _ who set foot upon the ground that had once been Camp Crystal Lake.  _ So why was she still alive? Why had he not killed her? _

_ Was she really so insignificant that she was not even  _ worth _ killing? _

“No!” she whispered in agonised horror with a low sob to the retreating figure she no longer could see. “Don’t go! You were supposed to kill me!”

She wanted to run after him, to demand that he do what he was supposed to do, to beg him to kill her because surely that was what he wanted; but instead, she fell to her knees upon the warped, splintery boards with a quiet moan, hunching over and burying her face in her hands.

“You were supposed to kill me!” she sobbed hopelessly. 

  
  



	6. Hunter/Hunted

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter VI - Hunter/Hunted**

Jason paced back and forth across the worn, bare wooden floorboards of the nearly empty main room of his ramshackle old cabin, lost in uncomfortable thoughts. Anything out of the ordinary bothered him more deeply than he cared to admit, even to himself. And the intensely unwelcome presence of the girl he could not categorise, who for whatever reason was not afraid of him as any remotely sane person should be, was as out of the ordinary as anything he had encountered in his decades of existence - as anything he could have imagined, even if he a were a more imaginative creature than he was. There was nothing particularly unique about her that he could pinpoint aside from his inability to determine her approximate age and the fact that she had greeted him with  _ hope _ . It was perplexing, as was his mother’s silence regarding the girl-woman-child, and his arm was cocked back to strike the chest of drawers closest to the front door when he was distracted from the whirlwind of confusion wracking his mind when he thought about the peculiar girl on the dock by the insistent jingling of little bells announcing the arrival of people at Crystal Lake. 

_ More trespassers _ .

With an odd sort of relief at the sudden redirection of his thoughts to something familiar which he  _ knew _ how to handle properly, what remained of his lips curved up into what might have been a smile, he scooped a mid-sized hatchet up off the long, low coffee table littered with mismatched candles that sat in the middle of the room, then he strode out the front door, slamming it shut behind him with such force it shuddered within its frame, and small chips of mildew-stained paint fluttered like so many ungainly snowflakes to the warped wooden floor of the shallow front porch. Jason’s fury at the presence of interlopers upon his land and the anticipation of the hunt flooding through him erased all thoughts of the girl from his mind. All that existed to him in that moment were his duty and the intruders who must die by his hand. Upon perfectly silent feet, Death stalked off in the direction indicated by that particular set of bells toward his prey.

—

—

Jared was brimming over with excitement as they hiked away from the cherry red ‘77 Chevy Blazer and into the dense woods where no employees of the forestry service had dared set foot in at least a decade, if not longer. Cley was home from college on Fall Break, finally home for the first time in two years; and, even better, he had agreed to go hunting with his younger brother. Best of all, he had even agreed to go wherever Jared wanted - to the site of the former Camp Crystal Lake. Jared hoped that he and his brother would encounter the legendary murderer who was said to haunt the woods around the lake, because he wanted  _ them _ to be the ones who finally put the killer in the ground, but even if Jason Voorhees proved to be nothing but a myth to scare kids away, he figured the hunting would be good in a place so widely avoided. It would be a fun weekend with his big brother, regardless. His father’s Winchester slapped against his thigh and his pack bounced against his lower back with each exuberant step.

“Are you sure about the Navy?” Cley asked from in front of his brother.

Jared did not even have to think before replying, “Yeah. I’ve always wanted to join up, Grandpa would be thrilled if he’d lived to see it, they’ll pay for school so I won’t have to go into crazy debt to get my degree, and the Navy’s supposed to have the best food in the military.”

Cley laughed.

“You’re still making big decisions with your belly, huh?”

“Just ‘cause you’ve been away for two years and changed a bunch doesn’t mean everything’s changed,” Jared retorted, laughing as well.

Somewhat self-consciously, Cley replied, “I don’t think I’ve changed  _ that _ much.”

“Long hair, tattoos … dude, I don’t think Ma even recognised you when we saw you in baggage claim! Shit, I was half afraid you’d gone all hippie and wouldn’t want to come hunting. You know, like ‘guns are bad and killing animals is eeeeevil’ and all that sorta shit.”

Grimacing at his brother’s assessment of his appearance, Cley asked, “Oh hell, you didn’t really think I’d changed that much, did you?” 

Although Cley was still laughing, Jared could hear a slight hint of genuine shock in his voice.

“Well, you never know, and it’s been two years …” the younger of the pair teasingly insinuated.

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned two years in as many minutes,” Cley interjected, pouncing upon the opportunity to change the subject away from how much or how little he had changed in that time. “I’d almost think you’ve missed me, little bro.”

When Jared failed to reply for a long moment, Cley continued, “You could’ve visited, too, you know.”

“You know I was busy with wrestling, soccer, and Scouts,” Jared stated flatly. “You didn’t even come to the ceremony when I made Eagle.”

“I would’ve, but I told you I was in exams - Calc II and Mechanic Behaviour of Materials in one week. Engineering sucks. Still, I wish I could’ve been there. I’m proud of you, though, if I didn’t tell you - I never made it to Eagle, and I fucking  _ tried _ .”

“Yeah, I know,” Jared mumbled.

Not wanting the mood of their first hunting trip together in years soured, Cley quickly changed the subject yet again, inquiring, “What d’you think we’ll find out here? I know deer’s out of season, but there’s sure as shit no game wardens out here, and I’ve seen several runs and a ton of scat. Wouldn’t mind nailing me a ten or twelve pointer to mount over the fireplace.”

“You’re living in a dorm, bro - what fireplace?”

—

—

The silent hunter creeping along, trailing the brothers, hidden within the deep shadows of the forest, could not have cared less about their fraternal conversation as he sized up his prey. The only words to which he paid any heed were Mommy’s, and she was telling him to kill. His quarry had proved to be two young men, one taller and skinnier with long hair, the other short and broad, both armed for a hunt themselves but weighed down by their large backpacks. It should not be too difficult to kill them, he knew, although they were spaced just far enough apart that he could not take both out with a single motion using either of the weapons he carried. This meant that the one he attacked second might have time to swing his gun up to firing position and shoot him before he had a chance to kill both. Preferring not to get shot again even though he knew it would not kill him or even slow him down much, Jason decided to watch and listen just a little bit longer, hoping that one of the pair would say or do something to show himself as slower to react or less adept with a firearm than the other. He had time. 

Anyway, if they walked just a little bit farther, they would walk right into one of the traps he had set the previous night. The fear generally made his prey that much easier to kill.

—

—

Cley paused to take a swig from his flask, the metal flashing silver in a beam of sunlight that managed to sneak through the thick canopy of golden leaves overhead, then held it out to his younger brother.

Jared held up his hands, sheepishly explaining, “I can’t - I’m in training and Coach’d kick me off the team if he found out.”

Laughing, Cley jiggled the flask at Jared, his dark brown eyes bright with mischief.

“C’mon! How’s Coach gonna find out? I’m sure as shit not gonna tell him. Are you?”

Running his hand through his close-cropped, dark hair, Jared grinned sheepishly then accepted the offered flask.

“Guess not. Alcohol’s not like pot - it’ll be outta my system by the time school’s back and Coach piss tests us, anyways.”

The younger boy took a long swig, then coughed a little before drinking again.

“Oh fuck, that shit’s  _ smooth _ !”

With a smirk, Cley pronounced, “Only the best for my baby bro,” then held out his hand for the flask.

The brothers continued along the overgrown remnants of the camp trail, passing the flask back and forth, unaware of the camouflaged presence following them, watching and analysing every word and movement, trying to determine which would die first. With a sigh, Jared turned the flask upside down upon realising it was empty.

“Please tell me this isn’t all you brought!”

Grinning, Cley shook his head, already feeling a pleasant buzz.

“Nah, I’ve got a whole ‘nother bottle in my pack. But let’s wait ‘til we’ve set up camp to break it out - don’t wanna run out too soon. It’s gotta last ‘til we’re ready to call it quits and go home sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

Since he had not drunk any alcohol in just over a year because he was constantly in training for one sport or another, even over the summer break, the whiskey had gone straight to Jared’s head - although he would never admit he had become such a lightweight, especially not to his brother. Therefore, he began walking more cautiously, watching where he set each foot upon the uneven ground and making a concerted effort not to slur his words. Although Cley, who had again walked up ahead of his younger brother, noticed nothing amiss, the silent hunter following them, hidden yet far closer than they could have imagined, took note of the changes alcohol wrought upon the shorter of the two.

“So, d’you think there’s any chance we’re gonna run into that homicidal maniac that’s s’posed to kill campers around here?” Jared asked, his voice bright with excitement and his words only faintly slurred.

“Nah,” Cley replied. “I know you’re hoping to go down in history as the guy who finally puts down the monster - it’s just about all you talked about the whole drive down from Connecticut - but he’s gotta be a weak old man by now, if he’s even still alive. The drowning thing that supposedly happened when he was a kid was back in the ‘50s, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jared admitted, “but they say he’s died a buncha times and always comes back, like some sorta killer zombie or something.”

Cley laughed loudly and startled the birds settled among the scarlet-clad branches of a nearby sugar maple into nervous flight, calling raucously to their fellows in warning, alerting them to the disturbance in that generally peaceful, quiet forest.

“Do you hear yourself, bro?” Cley asked incredulously. “Killer zombies running around with machetes in the New Jersey woods? Zombies aren’t real, and if there ever  _ was _ a real Jason Voorhees, he’s a lame old man by now, if he’s not already worm-chow.”

Cley hesitated for a moment, turning back to his little brother to add with a straight face, “Though if there’s zombies anywhere, it’d have to be in New Jersey. Ugh, what a fucking shithole of a state. Did you smell the difference when we crossed the border? Toxic waste, those freaks from The Jersey Shore, low-rent mafiosos … I guess killer zombies’d fit right in.”

Jared almost doubled over laughing.

Cley waited for his brother to catch his breath before continuing, “Anyway, I heard old Jason’s thing is killing horny teens he catches fucking, something to do with the counsellors being too busy screwing to notice when the dude fell in the lake as a kid, not a coupla guys out hunting. We didn’t bring chicks, so he wouldn’t come after us anyways.”

Sighing dejectedly in disappointment at how a bit of logic had almost completely destroyed any hope he had at getting to achieve the goal that had inspired him to choose Camp Crystal Lake for their hunt - a goal which now felt rather silly even to have considered as a possibility - Jared replied, “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” but he perked up a bit upon coming up with a better idea, adding, “Next time you’re home, maybe in June after my graduation, we gotta bring some girls along, see if that’ll flush out the killer. If he’s not dead. Just think how cool it’d be to be the guys who finally killed the infamous Jason Voorhees  _ for real  _ \- shit, imagine mounting that hockey mask he wears over the fireplace, how badass that’d be!”

—

—

Jason knew that the boys were discussing killing him, although it did not bother him much - several others had come here with similar goals over the years, and he felt confident in his knowledge that they would not be any more successful in that endeavour than any of the other fools who attempted to end his existence. Tommy Jarvis was the only person who had managed to kill him after the lake spat out his corpse to walk the Earth again after he drowned on his 11th birthday, and not even that death, as final as it had seemed at the time, had turned out to be permanent. He strongly doubted that he  _ could  _ die at this point. Were he in a better mood, had he not spent most of the day until the boys’ arrival pondering the unwelcome, peculiar girl’s presence at Camp Crystal Lake and her reaction to seeing him, he might have been amused by their assumption that he must be either a decrepit old man or a zombie, though. While he only possessed the most rudimentary knowledge of zombies, the ravenous, mostly mindless walking dead, he knew that he was something different, something else. He was a dead man animated by forces he had never bothered to investigate or question, but there the similarities ended. Jason was perfectly aware that he had no formal education, but despite that lack, he was far from mindless, and he only rarely ever felt the pangs of hunger, often going several seasons without consuming any food or water, and the occasional hunger he felt was never for human flesh. Well, he might admit, assuming he ever considered the matter in greater depth, that he probably would eat human flesh if the rare hunger struck him at a time when there was absolutely nothing else available or obtainable for him to eat. Not that such things mattered in the least. The exact, precise nature of his resurrected body, or indeed what sort of being he had become after his long-ago death, was irrelevant to him. All that truly mattered was his duty.

And that duty was calling to him in the form of his dead mother’s insistent voice ringing inside his head, telling to kill the brothers who still failed to realise that the subject of their conversation was right there, mere metres away from them, plotting their imminent demise.

Further unbeknownst to the brothers, only fifty metres ahead, the trap waited to be sprung, patient as only the inanimate and the dead could be.

—

—

Glancing back at his brother, Cley noticed that Jared’s eyes were ever-so-slightly unfocused. “Lightweight,” he muttered under his breath with fond amusement, almost too quietly to be heard.

“How much further to where we’re setting up camp?” Jared asked.

“One sec, I think we’re getting close but lemme check the map,” Cley answered, fumbling in the large side pocket of his khaki cargo pants without bothering to slow his pace.

He had just managed to pull out the somewhat crumpled paper while walking and was squinting at the faded print when he felt a sharp pain surrounding one leather hiking boot-clad ankle and a jerk, followed almost instantaneously by a sudden rush and a stomach-flipping jolt. The whole world seemed to tilt, then he realised that he was suspended in the air, hanging upside down by one leg, swinging like a crazed pendulum with his extended fingertips at least six inches from the ground upon which he had been walking barely a moment before.

“Oh FUCK!” Jared exclaimed.

“What the fuck!” Cley shouted. “Fucking cut me down!”

Jared fumbled for the hunting knife at his waist to cut through the thick cord from which Cley was hanging, then he saw the counterweight and screamed like a girl, almost dropping the long knife from shock-numbed fingers.

“Oh fuck,” he repeated, this time in a long, low moan of absolute horror at the sight of a nude male body, mostly pale as milk but a bilious dark violet at the extremities and lower back from livor mortis, and although the corpse’s back was facing him, so was its face, the dead eyes profoundly awful, a grotesque, whitish blue and cloudy, staring up at Jared in the palpable terror he must have felt as he died.

Unable to see the dead teen that startled and terrified his younger brother from where he was swinging helplessly, Cley yelled, “What the fuck, Jared! Cut me down already, dammit!”

That was when the afternoon shadows encasing the forest parted, and the tall, imposing figure Jared had been so eager to hunt stepped forward from the concealing woods, revealing itself upon the trail in front of the brothers. Moving as smooth as quicksilver, painstakingly sharpened machete in hand, the masked killer slashed at the hanging boy’s unprotected abdomen once, twice. Shining, slimy and purplish, his entrails fell in a shower of thick, dark crimson blood to drag in the dirt, gleaming like fat, wet sausages. 

Cley howled, his dark brown eyes bugging out of his deeply red face, reaching with shaking hands for his stomach, trying to pull his guts back inside where they belonged. But then Jason’s blade flashed again, this time across the dying man’s throat, biting so deeply it severed the arteries, windpipe, and oesophagus. Cley’s body jerked violently twice, blood spurting over the tattered legs of his killer’s pants, then he hung limp and still, twisting slowly in the air from the cord by which his body was suspended.

Jason stabbed the machete deep into the corpse’s chest, setting it to spinning like an inverted ballerina, pulled the hatchet from its loop at his waist, and stepped around the dead body to face the other boy.

When Cley’s entrails had fallen from his still-living, still-screaming body, the knife had fallen from Jared’s nerveless fingers, and he had fallen to his hands and knees, retching violently. But, by the time the killer stepped around his brother’s grotesquely spinning corpse with all the contained grace of a mountain lion, the Eagle Scout had regained his feet and held the antique Winchester tight to the crook of his shoulder, aiming down the smooth wooden barrel at the bloodstained monster bearing down upon him.

“Fuck you!” he screamed, his voice cracking with emotion, not thinking that he had gone to Crystal Lake intending to kill the very man approaching him with such emotionless determination, that he had even been imagining displaying that same battered, blood-spattered, bone white hockey mask staring down at him over his fireplace mere moments before. 

“You killed my brother!” he nearly sobbed. “Fuck you!”

Seeing the barrel of the shotgun aimed directly at his chest and the absolute rage in the boy’s tear-reddened eyes blazing from his bloodless face, Jason accepted that he was unlikely to come through this encounter unscathed, but he barely had time to brace himself before the boy’s finger squeezed the trigger.

“Die, motherfucker!” Jared bellowed as his finger curved around the trigger of his father’s shotgun, exerting pressure.

Jared barely even felt the kick in his shoulder he was so intent upon the murderer, his brother’s killer, the horror of a man bearing down upon him, hatchet in hand. The buckshot caught the large, masked man in the right upper chest and shoulder, ripping a low groan from behind the mask and knocking him back several feet. Jared crowed triumphantly when the weapon fell from Jason’s hand, expecting the monster to fall down immediately thereafter.

“Gotcha, fucker! How’d ya like that!”

But the killer did not go down.

The all-too familiar pain burned in the right side of Jason’s chest and in his shoulder as he staggered back from the force of the impact, and his hand spasmed, dropping the hatchet. But, much to his surprise given the force of the impact of the shotgun blast and his prior experiences with getting shot with various sorts of guns, he was still standing. Jason flexed the fingers of his right hand, smiling grimly behind his mask when they still moved at his command. The boy was yelling at him, screaming obscenities and taunting him, but that did not matter. He did not bother to reach down for the fallen hatchet, instead rushing at the boy before he thought to rack the shotgun again.

Jared was too shocked to do more than fall back a single pace when the monster who had just taken a chest full of double-aught buckshot fucking  _ sprang _ toward him. He was still thinking “that’s  _ impossible! _ ” when he felt the inhumanly strong fingers clad in red-stained yellow leather work gloves scrabbling at his face. He tried every move he had practiced for the upcoming district championship in wrestling, but he could not seem to get any leverage upon his attacker who must have outweighed him by double, and who seemed absolutely expert at using his mass to subdue - despite the wound that ought to have been incapacitating if not fatal and which was dripping blood, smearing it over both their chests as they struggled. 

Opening his mouth to grunt in pain, Jared felt those leather-clad fingers slide into his mouth. He bit down as hard as he could, tasting old leather, oil, and his brother’s blood, but Jason did not react at all, if he even felt the pain. Then, there was an awful pressure as the killer forced his mouth open. Jared tried to bite down harder, focussing all of his strength into his jaw, but it did no good. He knew that his mouth could not open any further, but then he could feel the corners of his lips tearing, the flesh parting at the impossible strength wrenching his mouth open, wider and wider. Blood filled his mouth, pouring down his chin and down his throat, and his struggling finally gave way to panic, but his violent thrashing did no good. Jason’s hands just kept exerting that terrible, terrible pressure, until finally something gave.

With an awful tearing sound, not entirely unlike the sound of wet sheets being ripped in half, Jason wrenched the younger boy’s head and jaw completely apart, the mandible coming off in his hand like a gory trophy and his neck breaking as the force when his jawbone tore free from his face snapped the upper portion of his head back so roughly that his skull was nearly wrenched off his spine.

The Camp Blood Killer took a deep, heaving breath, satisfied that both trespassers were dead and his mother’s voice was silent again in his head, then dropped the body and the severed mandible to the ground. Rolling his shoulders, he realised that his right shoulder blade and collarbone had likely been broken by the buckshot, but the wounds had already stopped bleeding and probably would be healed up completely within a day or two, at the most. Though hardly comfortable, the injuries would not slow him down, even if more intruders should enter his land that very day. Moving slowly but doing nothing to muffle the sounds of his booted footsteps upon the dead leaves covering the trail, he bent to retrieve his hatchet, slipping it back into its loop to hang from his belt, then he pulled the machete from the hanging body’s chest. He wiped it clean on the corpse’s pants then slid it into its straps upon his thigh, moving by muscle memory alone, not even having to look.

Once he had extracted the taller boy’s body from the snare, he let it fall onto the pile of intestines dragging beneath it and carefully reset the trap. He could use it until the corpse that served as a counterweight lost its integrity and fell apart, at which point he would give it back to the lake if the wild animals that called these woods home did not get to it first. Everything Jason did followed a pattern he had set years ago, every action serving a purpose. Maintaining and serving that order was one of the closest things to a pleasure in his existence.

When his work at the site of the kills was finally complete, he kicked the jawbone into the woods for scavengers to pick clean then ripped the guts from the taller corpse’s gaping abdomen, tossing them off to the side of the trail to serve the same purpose. Afterward, he hefted the shorter and neater of the bodies over his left shoulder and tied a length of rope he kept in his pocket to the other corpse’s ankle, so he could drag it behind him. As he walked back in the direction of his cabin, he considered how he could use the two new bodies. No thought of the peculiar girl and her thoroughly inexplicable response to seeing him crossed his mind. For the moment, Jason was almost as content as he was capable of being.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and criticism are LOVED!


	7. ...Into the Mess that Scalpels Make

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter VII - … Into The Mess That Scalpels Make**

Jayne had no idea how long she remained kneeling there upon the dock, weeping until her burning eyes could produce no more tears and her chest hurt with each wracking breath, unable to muster either the strength or the will to drag herself to her feet. Time’s passage meant nothing.  _ She  _ meant nothing. The handgun digging into her hip seemed to beckon with temptation, and only her deep-seated loathing for mess kept it holstered where it belonged.

“ _ Although most of the mess would just go in the lake, _ ” the insidious voice of her self-loathing whispered throughout her, and by Great Cthulhu was it tempting to just give in to its sweet coaxing.

But there was something about despair that somehow prevented her from ever acting upon her most self-destructive urge when she was hanging, torn and bleeding, from its razor blade claws. She knew and accepted that her end would be painful just like everything else about her existence, but there was just …  _ something _ … that felt profoundly wrong about dying with her mind in such a state. Something as wrong as she herself was. That something had kept her alive thus far through her blackest depressions when all she could do was huddle in her darkened room beneath her favourite blanket for days at a time, not even eating or brushing her wildly curling mop of hair, only taking breaks to trace over the lines of scar tissue inscribed in her skin with a scalpel.

Her hatred for herself spoke again, sweetly cajoling.

“ _ There are two scalpels, fresh and shiny and so very beautiful, so very sharp, still in their wrappers, sitting in the glovebox - just waiting for you. _ ”

_ That  _ temptation was far more powerful, and Jayne was not certain she had the strength to resist. 

_ Did she even want to resist? _

As her mind bounced amongst various horrors, she remembered something that clenched her pounding heart in a cruel fist. No matter how nicely it had started, with warm sunshine, singing birds, and the anticipation of a shower, today was never going to be a good day. It could not have been.  _ How could she have expected otherwise? How could she have forgotten today’s significance? Just because she was somewhere beautiful and peaceful, just because her morning began with less pain than usual?  _

Ten years ago today was when she had been ruined. The woman the naïve teenager she was might have grown up to be had been murdered,  _ destroyed,  _ had bled out from that unspeakable wound between her legs upon rough, greyish blue industrial carpet in the unfurnished third floor attic of a French Quarter apartment, her corpse left behind, and the pale, trembling, bleeding wraith that stumbled down the stairs after  _ he _ grew bored with torturing her was simultaneously someone other than the girl who had confidently climbed the stairs not even an hour earlier and no one at all.

The applesauce she had eaten earlier curdled in her stomach and Jayne could taste it trying to escape her body, but she swallowed thickly, trying to keep it down.  **This** _ was how the universe punished her for having the temerity to retain any shreds of hope. _ Clutching her hands to her belly, exerting light pressure in an attempt to soothe the clenching muscles, she tried to focus upon the physical discomfort so her mind would not go back to that trip into the city. In a cruel sort of irony, the more she tried to think about anything else, the more those awful, awful memories intruded upon her.

_ “Even if the serial killer deemed your blood unworthy of his blade, there are always others that would spill it _ ,” that internal voice reminded her, all the while snickering at her weakness.

It was probably the thought of the pair of individually wrapped Bard-Parker scalpels sitting lonely and longing to be used in the glove box of her little hatchback that finally gave her the strength to drag herself to her feet, although accepting that an urge to watch her bright scarlet blood dripping down her torso in striking contrast with her unhealthy pallor was a  _ motivator  _ was something she could not do. Despite how precise the patterns she cut were, the designs almost elegant in their balance and symmetry, more like scarification than outright self-mutilation, she felt deep shame both at cutting herself and at the resulting appearance of her body. 

_ No wonder Jason hadn’t wanted to sully his blade or the water in which he had drowned with something so weak, so contemptible and disgusting. _

Not that she would have liked how her body looked without the scars, either. Her self-hatred and the utter revulsion with which she viewed herself was just too all-encompassing.

_ And what did it say about her that she never left home without a scalpel or razor blade, even after having her own knife used on her in such a horrific way … ten agonising, miserable, wretched years ago today _ , she bleakly wondered. 

“ _ It means that you are so worthless and irrelevant that even a man who murders  _ everyone _ he sees knows that killing you is a pointless waste of time _ ,” the cruel voice inside of her informed her with a snide little giggle. “ _ You’re nothing - you’re not even worth killing. _ ”

A soft, hopeless moan escaped from between her tear-salty lips and she very nearly fell to her knees again, almost collapsing under the weight of her despair, everything in her head at that moment too much for her to bear. However, her tight grip upon her walking stick proved strong enough to keep her upright, and the siren call of sharp steel, blood, and the odd, burning pleasure of it was irresistible. Once she felt steady enough upon her feet to walk despite the headache blooming behind her eyes from crying so hard for so long, Jayne stooped to pick up the last jug of water, then trudged back toward her campsite. 

Her feet dragged over the ground, the walking stick hanging from her lacklustre grip trailing along unused behind her, but even though it caused her to stumble over the roots and rocks littering the overgrown trail, she could not force herself to lift her feet any higher. She could not force herself to care. She felt drained, as if her insides had been hollowed out with a melon-baller and tossed aside like the garbage they were, leaving her completely empty and at risk of collapsing in upon herself like a black hole.

A black hole. Now _that_ was an apt comparison. She often felt that when the x-acto knife was plunged into her that dreadful day ( _ten years ago today … that happened ten fucking years ago today … that’s when I was destroyed completely and irreparably and he should’ve just killed me then because that would’ve been better than … this …_ **anything** _would be better than_ **this** _…_ ), it had thrust a black hole deep into her womb, that the poison gestating within her somehow still living and breathing shell that really should have been dead transformed her into a great, sucking void of darkness that warped everything that came too close.

She was in such a dazed state that she barely recognised her campsite when she finally made it back. Robotically, her mind too caught in the bloodied steel jaws of the trap that was the worst of her many awful memories for full awareness, she poured the water from the last jug into the camp shower reservoir, not noticing when her shaking hands splashed some onto her converse sneakers even though it soaked through the black canvas and into her socks beneath almost immediately. Any anticipation she might have felt for the upcoming opportunity to wash off the griminess of travel was repressed beneath her despair and the rejection (as she interpreted Jason’s failure to kill her to be) she had just endured.

She believed rejection to be another of the defining characteristics of her existence, not far behind pain and abuse. Often enough, she was the one rejecting, but then again she was also prone to abusing - at least to abusing herself … seeking out smaller pains to distract herself from the worst of it - so whether the rejection was directed to her or from her was an unimportant detail in the formation of her belief. And she accepted that all of it, the abuse, the pain, and the rejection she experienced, was deserved, even when she could not manage to figure out precisely what she had done to deserve it. She focused upon the what rather than the why, finding the why either too obscured and convoluted or too frightening to contemplate in too much depth. On the one hand, the what simply  _ was _ , and  _ that _ her mind could accept. But the  _ why _ \- the why had teeth and was prone to biting into her and not letting go.

Once Jayne finished setting up the camp shower so the sun could heat the water within the reservoir, her movements dream-like, slow and mechanical but not as methodically, almost obsessively careful as they ordinarily would have been, she turned to face Rodney. Although she had no memory of picking up her keys, she somehow found them so tightly gripped in her shaky hand that her knuckles were white and the rough grooves dug bruisingly into her palm. She hated herself for what she was about to do to herself, but she loved it at the same time; she revelled in every aspect of the ritual even though cutting herself disgusted her.

In the glovebox, the pair of individually-wrapped scalpels lay atop the old Civic’s paperwork - her proof of insurance, the registration, the receipts for new tires, spark plugs, fuses, the alternator she had replaced the previous December, the oil she preferred to change herself when her body allowed, and the vehicle title she had already signed over so that whoever found Rodney once she was gone could own him or sell him to someone else without any hassle. She just hoped that whoever found him would not junk him because despite his somewhat rough appearance he ran like a top and easily had another 100,000 miles left in him or more, though she knew that his end fate was out of her hands. At that moment, though, Jayne took no pride in her organisation and attention to detail. She had eyes only for the blades. It would be different, she expected, performing her ritual in the woods instead of in the private sanctuary of her bathroom before the despised mirror, which felt vaguely uncomfortable. Any change to the pattern she developed so many years ago was unsettling, but aside from the setting, she expected to be able to replicate the steps as long-settled habit meant them to be performed.

_ It would just have to be sufficient; if it were not  _ …

“No, Jayne, don’t think of that. It  _ will  _ be sufficient. It  _ will  _ be enough,” she murmured out loud, trying to convince herself after locking the glove box while she carried a fat, red candle already one-quarter burnt, one of the scalpels, and a bottle of 90% isopropyl alcohol back to the blue-tinted shade of the tarp.

A sort of peace born of the mindlessness allowed by following a familiar pattern settled over her as she prepared for the ritual, the tension knotting the muscles of her neck, upper back, and shoulders loosening when her thoughts about what she viewed as the killer’s cruelly dismissive rejection of her and the significance of the tenth anniversary faded from the front of her mind.  _ Nothing mattered but replicating her solemn rite of blood. _ She knelt upon the crinkling blue plastic ground cover then carefully placed the scalpel in its wrapper atop her stack of novels with shaky hands, balancing it at a diagonal across the bottom right corner, and lit the candle, placing it opposite the scalpel at the top left corner of the topmost volume. Pausing for a long moment, she examined the altar, her breathing deep and even despite the tremors wracking her hands. It was not perfect, but when she wracked her brain for how she might improve it, she could come up with nothing.

_ It would just have to do. _

She dragged her pillow over and sat upon it, gently pushing off her shoes with her feet and placing them beside the pillow before crossing her legs and trying to get comfortable. Closing her eyes, she pulled the loose-fitting grey T-shirt off over her head and opened her eyes again to fold it neatly then laid it beside her converse. She had not put on a brassiere that morning as she typically went without, considering them unnecessary unless she planned to go running because her breasts were small and muscular enough that they barely bounced during her normal activities and the straps had a tendency to slip off her narrow shoulders, irking her. Goose prickles arose along her arms as an errant breeze slithered beneath the tarp to caress her scarred flesh now exposed, causing her to shiver at the reminder that she was sitting half-naked outside in the middle of the woods although it was not truly all that cold, and the candle’s flame guttered but was not extinguished. Uncapping the bottle of isopropyl alcohol, she poured a capful into her hands and rubbed them together to sterilise them, poured out a second capful, then picked up the paper-wrapped blade.

The tremors wracking her hands subsided as she peeled back the wrapper with cautious care bordering upon reverence, revealing the small, curving #10 blade set in its seafoam-green plastic handle that always felt so warm, so good and  _ right _ in her hand. Although the packaging proclaimed it to be sterile, she dipped the razor edge into the cap of alcohol out of an excess of caution born from how prone to infection her medications left her, then lifted the cap to drizzle its cooling contents over her breasts and belly. Once the preparatory work for the ritual was complete, the setup process itself a ritual of sorts, a smoky haze rose up within her mind, obscuring all conscious thought and blotting out even the worst of her memories until everything was obscured within the swirling grey fog.

It was the closest thing to peace Jayne knew in her adult life, and she treasured it.

She barely had to look down to position the scalpel blade correctly at the side of her left breast, the rolling of her shoulder and the angle of her elbow necessary to making the first incision deeply embedded in her muscle memory. Barely exerting any pressure at all, she sucked in a breath then slowly slid the cold, damp steel along the line she had first incised almost fifteen years before, the blade hugging the curve of her flesh and the blood welled out in its wake, sluggish and crimson and hot against her chilled skin. There was no pain, not really - just a faint stinging that preceded the gentle flow of adrenaline through her veins. She did not consider it a rush of adrenaline like the sensation when seeing a large truck barrelling toward the rear of her stopped car giving no indication of hitting the brakes as it was too mild for that, but it was all the more pleasant for the moderation of its intensity. Sensations that were too intense, even pleasurable ones, tended to alarm her and render her too uncomfortable to enjoy them. 

And, though admitting it only increased her disgust with herself, feeling the cold blade parting the topmost layers of her skin  _ was _ pleasurable. With a blank mind filled with kitten-grey mist and a softy sighed exhalation of breath, she proceeded through the ritual, scratching each of the eight longest lines of the pattern that extended outward like the arms of a windmill or a childish drawing of the sun from the pale rosey-pink hub of her nipple. Once the main lines of the left sunburst were complete, she switched the scalpel to her right hand, repeating the process, following the lines of silvery-pink scar tissue radiating outward from her right nipple. 

She hated looking at her right breast when she reached that part of the ritual, though, because there the pattern was imperfect, marred by the one thick, raised, purple-tinged white scar she had semi-unintentionally inflicted upon herself the first time she attempted to cut with a scalpel blade rather than the x-acto knife she had used up until that point. Not knowing how much sharper a scalpel was, she had pressed the blade in just as firmly as she was accustomed to doing with box-cutter and crafting blades, and to her horror (and fascination), the split flesh of her breast had sagged open like a hungry mouth, revealing the dark purple muscle tissue beneath. For some reason, even though it was by far the deepest incision she had ever carved into her skin, the resulting injury actually had bled  _ less _ than the shallower cuts typically did. It had also been strangely painless, the main sensation being gravity tugging vaguely uncomfortably at the edges of the wound where the skin sloughed open and a strange sort of numbness that did not precisely  _ tingle _ but came close thereto. And although getting a glimpse of the muscle tissue beneath her skin was a thrill of sorts, the whole experience had been unsatisfying, lacking both the stinging and burning sensations and the hot flow of blood to drip down her skin that she sought, even craved, from her ritual. Unable to face a doctor and explain what had happened, fearing the consequences of being found out and having her ugly little secret revealed, she had just used butterfly bandages to close the wound, and although it had healed well enough, that thicker, more colourful scar did not match its fellows, interrupting the symmetry of the pattern and therefore destroying any beauty she might have been able to see in her scarification. It looked like someone had stabbed her with a kitchen knife in her right upper chest, not like it was a carefully drawn and redrawn, ritualistic representation of Jayne’s struggle to balance her compulsion to create and maintain order in her world against the awful, uncontrollable, roiling chaos of her rapidly declining health and her emotional volatility. Therefore, she hated that ugly, wrong scar and the breast it adorned. However, that hatred did not prevent her from cutting upon that particular subtly curving canvas, re-tracing the other scars (but  **never** that one) or from trying to maintain the symmetry of the other, thinner scars around it.

Laying down the scalpel on the altar of novels so the blade was suspended over thin air, making sure it touched nothing that might contaminate it more than her vile flesh and tainted blood already had once she completed the process of tracing over the lines upon her right breast; then, tilting her head back, she closed her eyes and let the combination of sensations roll over her - the slight, ticklish sting of the wounds, the subtle burn that made her breath hiss between her teeth as the droplets of rubbing alcohol with which she sterilised her skin slid over and into the cuts, and the liquid heat of the blood slowly flowing down over her flesh. No hints of guilt or self-loathing yet accompanied the act and the feelings it evoked in her, and she very nearly revelled in the combination of almost-peace and almost-pleasure that she never had been able to find elsewhere in any other experience. After a minute or two, when she felt the warm tickle of the first rivulet of blood sliding into the shallow indentation of her bellybutton, she poured some alcohol onto a clean washcloth and carefully cleaned the stains upon her chest before intentionally flooding the wounds with the isopropyl alcohol and slitting her eyes, hissing with her back arched at the intensity of the tingling burn that ensued … which was probably her favourite of the sensations associated with her ritual.

Her eyes heavy-lidded with the shameful bliss, Jayne picked up the scalpel again in her left hand and began tracing along the shorter lines of scar tissue that each lay halfway between each of the longer, sluggishly bleeding lines she had just incised around each nipple, contributing to the sun ray effect. Watching how crimson welled out along the thin lines, following in the path of the steel blade gliding across her skin, the corners of her mouth curved up into an oddly sated little smile that probably would have horrified anyone who happened upon her and saw what she was doing to herself in that moment. Perhaps fortunately, two of the only three other people then present in the entirety of that forest were over a mile away from Jayne’s campsite and mere moments away from their far, far bloodier encounter with the third, who himself was busy silently stalking them, intently observing them while planning how best to effect their imminent demises, so there was nobody anywhere nearby to witness her terrible, illicit pleasure.

For a few minutes, Jayne considered extending the ritual, moving down her torso to trace the outline of her protruding rib cage and each of her ribs with lines of scarlet, to re-draw the inverted cross at the base of her sternum and the precise, wavy lines of the 6-rayed sunburst around her belly button, but continuing did not feel necessary. The pinwheels upon her breasts were complete and her mind was blessedly empty of the overpoweringly devastating emotions with which she knew no more effective ways to cope - and if they returned … more properly,  _ when  _ they returned, three-quarters of the scarred white canvas upon which she drew her pain’s design remained blank and open. But, to her surprise, although she did not feel the need to sketch upon her skin with the scalpel any further, apparently the ritual was not quite complete after all. She had never before cut herself outside of the privacy of her bathroom, so she could not be certain that the sudden, blinding  _ need _ she felt was simply due to her performing the ritual outdoors, or if it was because she was bleeding  _ here _ , in this particular forest with its blood-soaked history and tragic curse. Regardless of why, though, the compulsion was irresistible - she found herself powerless not to run her fingers over her chest, to gather up as much of her blood upon her fingertips as she could then hold out her dripping hands over the leaf and pine straw littered ground, allowing the precious droplets to fall to the earth like so many unfaceted rubies - an offering of her very essence to that voracious, hungering land where the dead walked and Nature reigned supreme.

The wind rattling through the autumn leaves, the songs of the birds and insects, and the chittering of the squirrels all seemed to accept her sacrifice, wordlessly thanking her, without any common language in which to speak, for the offering of herself to the forest as she peacefully, silently bled in the Autumn quiet.

Once scabs began to form over the shallow cuts and she had cleaned the scalpel and the smeared blood dripping down her chest with isopropyl alcohol, she blew out the candle then spread out one of the blankets at the edge of the tarp and flopped back upon it with a sigh, able to gaze up at the sky from her position, her fingers trailing in the forest detritus above her head. The grey haze clouding her mind was already starting to fade, revealing the shadowy shapes and forms that hinted at everything within her that she was so desperate to escape, and she knew that the ephemeral sense of peace filling her would not last long. She cherished it all the more for that. The guilt, the deep aching of her joints, the fear of her body turning against her and increasing her suffering beyond what she already had experienced, the sickeningly awful rape - by blade when his flesh failed to pierce her - she survived exactly ten years before, the agonising rejection she felt when the killer turned his back upon her without fulfilling her wish for an end to everything, and all of her bitterly painful memories would all come crashing down upon her soon enough. Until then, she would enjoy the brief respite from herself that her ritual of blood and steel afforded her.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions? Comments? Criticism?


	8. By All That I Have Done Wrong

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter VIII - By All That I Have Done Wrong**

As the sun began its slow descent toward the treetops, gilding the green, scarlet, yellow, and brown leaves adorning them with its golden-red luminance, the infamous Camp Blood Killer finished properly utilising the newest pair of corpses, incorporating each body into a part of the extensive alarm system he had designed and constructed to alert him to the presence of interlopers along with their locations. Much of the system was comprised of tripwires attached to lines of rope or wire that led to the bank of dangling clusters of bells in his cabin that rang when triggered, and the rest of the system might be considered “jump scares” - bodies positioned to elicit maximum shock and terror in the trespassers who encountered them, inciting them to panic, encouraging them to run in another direction - preferably directly into a trap that would hold them until his arrival - and eliciting screams by which they could be located with more precision than the bells allowed. Done with integrating the brothers’ bodies into that intricate yet oddly simple system, he finally was able to return to his ramshackle little cabin deep in the woods, but before he made it even halfway back, the state of his clothes reminded him that he needed to stop by the lake to clean up the blood that was already starting to stink. His yellow leather gloves and faded workman’s clothing fairly dripped with the gore of his latest pair of messy kills, but the sensation of blood drying and flaking off his skin in large patches, stiffening the ragged fabric he wore, and reeking of an outhouse and death did not themselves bother him. The only reason why he felt so compelled to wash it off quickly was the odour, as his prey might be able to detect his presence thereby too soon for his liking.

Despite his hurry to be rid of the stench of blood and opened bowels that was enough to send the woodland animals scurrying away from him, his progress through the forest was slow and halting because he stopped to inspect the traps he passed along the way, resetting those that had been triggered by the wildlife he had built them not to catch and checking the ropes and wires, pulleys, and triggers that controlled them to ensure that they remained functional. When he encountered a great fallen tree lying across the faint trace of a trail long unmaintained which he was following, Jason grew pleased to have chosen to walk that particular path to the lake even though it was a rather circuitous route. Climbing over the massive trunk with ease, he examined it carefully, hoping that whatever creature had triggered the deadfall - a massive version of the simple crushing trap that he had erected after coming upon the elderly rock elm tree with the entirety of its spreading canopy broken off neatly just over halfway up its close to hundred foot height after a particularly intense winter storm two years earlier - had managed to escape the horrible death by crushing, already knowing it had not been a person that triggered the trap by the lack of the particular, cloying odour of decomposing human flesh along with the lack of evidence around the trap of either a hiker’s passage or the presence of furless limbs sticking out from beneath the trunk.

Given the great weight of the almost forty foot long section of tree, Jason knew it was entirely possible that any one of the supports had simply given way beneath it without being triggered by anything - after all, this was the largest deadfall he had ever engineered, and experience had taught him long ago that simply doubling all of the measurements in a system like a trap to account for when one element was twice the standard size he was accustomed to using was rarely correct, so he had been required to calculate the necessary adjustments to the upright supports, the main support, and even the triggering mechanism … all without the aid of any knowledge whatsoever of the applicable mathematics and physics equations, a calculator, a ruler, a scale, a protractor, or even a pencil and paper upon which to sketch out his design. The fact that he always attempted to build his traps so that it was easy for humans to trigger them but unlikely if not impossible for an unwitting animal to do so only made designing and building them more complex. Not knowing how or why the trap had collapsed, he was concerned that it might have accidentally crushed some poor woodland creature; and further, he wanted to reset it - and properly this time. Therefore, he crouched down near the top end where a precisely pruned section of the bare crown remained intact and wormed his hands into the depression beneath the fallen tree, gauging that the impact made the concavity some six inches deep despite the dry, hard-packed earth onto which it fell. Upon seeing that tangible reminder of just how heavy the section of tree was, he planted his feet firmly upon the ground, bracing himself, and lifted up one end of the tree trunk as he stood, his muscles straining against the weight while his buckshot- and broken bone-filled (but already healing after only somewhat less than an hour and a half had passed since the boy had shot him) right shoulder howled protests that raced shrieking down the nerves in his right arm and across his back which he stoically tried to ignore. 

Much to his relief, once he had manoeuvred the tree trunk into an upright position and leaned it against the large pin oak shading that section of the trail, he did not see anything lying crushed and dead in the depression left in the ground by the heavy section of old tree crashing down hard upon it. Relieved not to have found a dead animal crushed beneath the tree, he quickly began reassembling the upright supports. Unsurprised to find one cracked completely in half and another permanently and irreversibly bowed due to the immense weight that had put too much pressure upon it for almost a year, he reinforced the upright supports that had survived the trap’s collapse and replaced the two that had failed, altering several of the angles in an attempt to prevent accidental triggering or another such collapse. 

All of his traps were constructed solely via trial and error, but as the years passed and his experience grew, his knowledge grew, as well, and the number of such errors steadily declined. While deadfalls were among the simplest of the traps he set, rigging up one so large that it would instantly kill the person who triggered it upon collapsing was far from simple, especially when he was trying to design it in a manner whereby innocent animals would not be caught by it. Jason knew nothing of the mathematics or physics employed in the construction of any of his traps, and he absolutely would not have recognised any of the equations used to calculate force, trajectories, and angles, seeing such as mere scribblings devoid of meaning, and yet his untaught, unknowing mind performed them quickly in his head - and with a remarkable degree of accuracy. 

Once he felt confident in the strength of the upright supports and had determined their proper placement, he began reconstructing the trap proper. Disguising the deadfall, making it look like the large, mushroom and lichen-adorned trunk leaning across and over the path, was due to events that had occurred naturally when the great rock elm fell as opposed to human intervention - not that Jason had considered himself  _ human _ in many, many years - was actually more difficult for him than calculating its assembly. However, after a few small adjustments, he was confident that the fools coming to Crystal Lake would feel comfortable passing beneath it and therefore would be caught unawares by the large section of tree rushing down to crush them and thereby saving him both the hassle and risk of injury involved in killing them himself.

Finally done repairing and then reassembling the deadfall, Jason tested it once, triggering the trap even though the persistent, nagging ache of his wounded right shoulder made the thought of having to reset it once again distasteful. Still, he preferred to be thorough whenever he had the time to do so; therefore, he focused upon the functional operation of the trap, mostly for the sake of the trap itself, but also to tamp down his awareness of the broken bones grinding together as he muscled the massive remains of the tree back into position, held in place by the uprights and the main support high above the narrow, overgrown path. He took a bit more time to hide the deep depression left when the deadfall collapsed, wanting nothing to put the doomed trespassers walking the path on guard, then stepped back to inspect the trap, satisfied. His task thus completed, he at last was able to go down to the lake where he could rinse off the stinking blood and gore that saturated his clothing, stiffening his gloves and the ragged old fabric uncomfortably as it had dried and was flaking off his discoloured skin with his every movement. 

After emptying his pockets of the bits of twine, rope, and wire he always carried and laying his axe and machete at the edge of the lake, along with his belt, the leather holster that strapped thereto and wrapped around his thigh, and the loops from which he hung various tools, he waded in until submerged up to his chin, the cool water gently lapping at the bottom edge of the mask that concealed his despised horror of a face. While sluicing the effluvia that had soaked into his clothing off the aged fabric, he noticed that the sun-warmed water was significantly less chilly than it had been the previous night when he ventured into the lake to kill the naïvely giggling defilers of that sacred place as they cavorted in the water where he had died for the first time, seemingly oblivious both to the significance of the lake and the doom bearing down upon them. Although he was not negatively affected by temperature extremes, he found the subtle movement of the less-than-frigid water surrounding him relaxing, so he took his time in digging the pellets of buckshot out of his healing shoulder with his ragged fingernails and pushing pieces of broken bone back into their proper positions within the wound. 

All in all, the latter part of the afternoon had been quite satisfying, despite the shotgun blast he had taken from mere feet away and his mild disappointment at having found the deadfall apparently collapsed beneath its own weight, probably due to a miscalculation on his part. However, the issue of the undefinable girl with her peculiar response to seeing him, whose presence upon the land he defended inexplicably failed to drive his mother to urge him to kill, still remained, and with time to think while cleansing himself and his clothing, that conundrum returned to the forefront of his thoughts. He was unsure what in particular might have reminded him of her and brought the situation to mind, but his thoughts were troubled as he strode dripping from the lake in which he had drowned as a child and from which he had been reborn as a deadly, virtually indestructible spirit of vengeance. At least only one critical task remained for the day - to clear the five dead teenagers’ campsite of all evidence that they ever had polluted his land with their unwelcome presence - then he could return home and focus upon how to rid himself and the camp of the unwelcome little intruder. 

His body and clothes clean and stripped of the stench of death that might have given away his presence to his prey, and his shoulder beginning to heal in earnest now that the metal pellets were removed from the wound and the broken bones within had been realigned, Jason set off for the abandoned, beer can and other trash-littered campsite. Thanks to the irresponsible fools who continued to come to Camp Crystal Lake despite his violent, bloody efforts to discourage visitors, it often felt like his work never would be done. 

—

—

As always, guilt and remorse returned to Jayne along with her self-loathing shortly after the buzz she felt whenever she etched her body in blood wore off, bringing reinforcements that swarmed over her with utter revulsion to increase her misery. In their disgust at what she was and what she had done to herself, they reminded her that she was worthless and vile, a barely-living font of corruption, of refuse, of putrefaction and filth - hideous with her bony frame, pallid skin, untameable hair, ruined body, and scars … so many scars, inside and out, scars both physical and emotional; a walking horror show, disgusting, awful, unworthy of the title of woman or human; unworthy of everything, even death. Just bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

She might have curled up on herself upon the blanket beneath the artificial blue sky of the tarp and wept, but she had long since run out of tears, having cried herself hollow upon the dock when the masked man had turned and walked away. All that remained of her was a vast emptiness encased within a fragile shell like a cicada’s shed husk, so light, floating upon the breeze that would toss her about wherever it pleased. She had no recollection of putting away all of the accoutrements of her ritual, but the scalpel, candle, and bottle of rubbing alcohol were nowhere in sight and she found the blanket upon which she had lain to gaze up at the sky neatly folded upon the stack of its fellows beneath her pillow. As the sun sank lower in the sky, a chilling Fall wind began to blow, which she assumed to be what had prompted her to pull on her black longsleeve T-shirt although she had no memory of dressing, and her small feet were again encased in her jungle boots. The lost time failed to alarm her.

She was still too mentally absent to be alarmed by much of anything, and she was long accustomed to the daze that inevitably followed performing the ritual.

Not knowing what prompted her to move, she picked up her walking stick and began listlessly meandering along the lake trail, ignoring the high, prickly underbrush clawing at her bare calves exposed above the protection of her boots, passing by the turn to the dock and continuing to follow the overgrown path. The wind tugged at her plaited pigtails and nipped at her exposed nose, but she ignored that, too. As she was nothing, nothing mattered.

Eventually, she reached a broad clearing where a trio of neon green tents seemed to have sprouted from the surrounding ground that was littered with crushed beer cans and other trash. Assuming that the campers were either down at the lake or dead by the infamous and, as she had so recently discovered, very real killer’s hand (“ **_They_ ** _ would be worthy of death’s cold embrace,” that cruel voice of her self-hatred that festered within her whispered conspiratorially. “Unlike you.” _ ), she sighed in disgust. Why must people be so careless and rude?

“Fucking kids, so disrespectful …” she muttered under her breath when she thoughtlessly began gathering the litter they had left behind into a tidy pile, assuming based upon the sheer number of cans that the campers were either high school or university students. 

Her body moved simply because it needed to do so, some compulsion to  _ do  _ driving her, albeit absent any real intent on her part. As she bent and crouched to pick up the empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and crumpled bags of crisps, her knees singing their protest anthem of pops and crunching, grinding crepitus, Jayne shivered at the sensation of her shirt brushing against the fresh scabs decorating her chest. For a brief instant, she regretted her failure to put on a brassiere to prevent that exact sensation; even though it actually felt oddly pleasant - almost too pleasant, really - it also served as an unavoidable reminder of the horrible thing she had just done to herself yet again, one she found impossible to ignore. However, she doubted that she had been thinking about anything at all while she dressed after the ritualistic spilling of blood, given her complete lack of memory of having chosen a shirt and pulling it down over her head, though as evening approached and the temperature continued to drop, she was glad that she had chosen in her mental fog to pull on a longsleeve. Additionally, although the brush of soft, thin fabric against sensitised, blade-scored flesh was distracting, serving both to remind her of how weak and awful she was and as a strangely pleasing stimulation, she hated trying to wash blood stains out of her bras. At least the blood seeping through would not show upon the black fabric of the T-shirt when one or more of the scabs inevitably cracked open and bled as she moved and stretched.

Fortunately for her precarious composure, the corpses of the two victims Jason had slaughtered at that site the previous evening along with the bear trap that had captured the boy’s ankle were long since removed, and Jayne’s perceptions were still muted by the distracting extremity of her emotions, so she failed to notice the copious amount of rusty stains splashed upon the dry leaves and pine needles in front of one of the tents. Neither did she explore the campsite, fearing that the absent campers might return at any moment, doubting that they would mind seeing her cleaning up the mess they left around their campfire but knowing that it would look suspicious if they caught her poking around their tents and gear, which prevented her from finding the long, bloodstained tear slashed through the back of one of the tents. Had her senses not been somewhat dulled, she  _ would  _ have seen the blood staining the fallen leaves, and she would have known that the campers were dead, that they had died violently, and that knowledge, coupled with her encounter with the unspeaking man out upon the dock, would have tipped her sideways to plummet off the precipice of anguished hopelessness, dizzyingly spiralling into the black caverns of despondency. She might not have had any tears left within her to cry by that point, but the physical manifestation of her devastation at what she would have viewed as concrete proof of the killer’s rejection - irrefutable proof that she was irrelevant, insignificant, inconsequential, worthless, and everything else her self-loathing constantly insisted that she was - would have been profoundly awful. Ravaging. Ruinous. Crippling. Replicating all of the most agonising pain of her pain-riddled existence jumbled together, blended and fused with her self-hatred, resentment, disappointment, and anger into a bitter infusion that would be pumped forcefully into her burnt-out veins.

But Jayne was insulated from the cataclysmic tempest of emotions that cognisance of the campers’ fates would have aroused in her by the obscuring fingers of mist left behind following cutting and by her focus upon her task. As she gathered up the trash, she began singing quietly, her thin soprano lower than usual, textured with the faint rasp left behind by her extended crying jag.

“Broken doll baby and she says that life’s a waste … ”

Preferring not to be caught by the campers, not because she believed that she was doing anything wrong by cleaning up the mess they had left behind when they went off to wherever they were or because she thought she looked particularly suspicious, but rather because she dreaded being engaged in conversation on her best day - which this emphatically was  _ not _ \- due to her much-hated compulsion to be warm and polite even to strangers, she tried to hurry. Just because of the possibility that she might be dragged into a conversation with people she already despised without having met them just because of the lack of care they showed in setting up and maintaining their campsite, their apparent disregard for safety or the forest they had chosen to invade, her hands grew damp, and she could feel a line of cold sweat trail down her spine, goading her to work even faster. However, her body refused to obey, trapping her into a slow and methodical process of picking up each discarded can or bag individually and carrying them over to the pile she was making beside the ashes of their abandoned bonfire. When she paused to examine the large pile of ashes, blackened wood, and broken glass, she halted her soft, low singing to cluck her tongue in distaste at how incautiously the fire had been constructed. Dead leaves and pine straw encroached upon it, and she considered it a minor miracle that they had not accidentally set their too-close tents or the surrounding woods ablaze.

As she limped toward the trees surrounding the clearing to find a leafy branch she could use to sweep the desiccated fallen leaves away from the fire for when they returned ( _ if  _ they returned - she knew too well that it was quite possible if not probable that they were dead, given where they had chosen to go camping) so that they would not put the forest at risk when they rebuilt their bonfire that evening, she resumed her quiet singing.

“She doesn’t try / I watch her spirit die / But giving up the ghost would feel so good …”

Finding a suitable branch was easy, and she returned with it to the centre of the clearing, continuing the song as she swept the area surrounding the fire clear of combustible material. 

_Is that broken glass_ in _the fire?! Why do kids have to be so damnably irresponsible?_

Growing increasingly frustrated with the absent campers, she squatted down and picked the shards of glass out of the ashes that clung to her slightly damp fingertips one by one, recognising them as once having been a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. She rolled her eyes, although there was a part of her, deep down and unacknowledged, that was envious of their ability to drink. The medications she had to take made alcohol far too dangerous for her to drink, and although she hated losing control of herself too much to ever have had fun being drunk anyway, there was a part of her that still wished it was at least an option.

Once she felt that the fire was as safe as she could make it, although she did not trust the campers not to do  _ something  _ to screw it up when they returned, she resumed picking up litter, still slowly singing.

Seeing the tidy pile which she had made of the trash that had been spread across half the clearing, Jayne smiled faintly, pleased to have accomplished something positive in an otherwise dreadful day. Of course, she had not thought to bring a trash bag with her when she wandered aimlessly away from her campsite - she had not been thinking of anything at all, and she was somewhat surprised she had even put on her boots before leaving. Oh well, she had a half-full box of trash bags in Rodney, so she decided to go back to her own neat little campsite and get one then return. The fogged daze in which she had left her campsite had faded while she cleaned up after the absent campers, but her depressed mood and the awful memories that triggered it had not returned in their worst form to torment her - keeping busy was good.

With a goal in mind to act as a distraction from her memories of the assault and torture she had endured exactly ten years before and her bitterness at the Camp Blood Killer’s inexplicable and to her mind cruel decision not to kill her, she headed back along the barely visible trail back to her own campsite to grab a trash bag to bring back so she could finish her self-appointed task.

—

—

Intending to dispose of the trash and camping gear left in the clearing by the prior night’s kills, Jason hiked down the trail along which the running girl had fled, expecting to spend the remainder of the late afternoon engaged in that simple, mind-numbing task which he had performed uncountable times before. Cleaning up after trespassers was just another one of his many duties to the land where both he and his mother had been killed so long before. He doubted that he would find much if anything there for which he could find a use, but it was always worth checking. He had been pleasantly surprised before by what he found scavenging through the belongings of the dead, though - shears, axes, good hunting knives, lengths of wire, parachute cord, blowguns, darts, climbing rope, various tools that came in handy, especially because he could not obtain such things on his own, and even a few portable generators. Anything he found for which he had no immediate use, even junk he knew he would never use, he stored down below the ground in the old mining tunnels that crisscrossed the land. His mind engaged in contemplation of his mental list of the items he needed and hoped to find as he came to the clearing where the five dead teenagers had made their camp, he was startled to hear what sounded like a human voice. He stopped in his tracks and stood, listening.

_ Someone was there. _

_ Singing. _

_ Had friends come to join the dead? _

Upon silent feet he approached the clearing, leaving behind the damp impressions of his large boots. He halted just within the tree line to observe, expecting to see more teenagers who had come out to join their friends to party or possibly another group of hunters who had happened upon the site. Instead, he saw a familiar, slight figure with long, copper-blonde braids hanging down her back walking around the ashes of the prior night’s bonfire. Closing his eyes in exasperation, he exhaled a quiet sigh and fingered the handle of the axe hanging at his waist.  _ Why had she not fled Camp Crystal Lake after their bizarre encounter upon the dock? Would she continue to haunt him like some irritating ghost, showing up unexpectedly wherever he went? _

Again, his mother was strangely silent in his mind, not encouraging him to kill the girl, and again he wondered  _ why  _ \- he was reasonably certain that the girl was not the child he first had believed her to be, which made her an unwelcome intruder, a trespasser, which in turn ought to incite Mommy to scream in his head for her blood. It perplexed him, which made him intensely uncomfortable. He was unaccustomed to being confused by what he encountered within his realm, and the last time he had felt  _ this _ confused was when he had tried to kill little blonde Tina Shepard and had found himself confronted with a terrible power beyond his comprehension that flung objects at him without a hand to pick them up, hanged him, brought the roof down upon his head, and set him on fire. That had been a singularly awful experience, and one he hoped never to repeat. Even then, though, his mother had not fallen silent until his body came to rest in chains at the bottom of Crystal Lake once more.

_ What was so different about this girl? _ She looked perfectly ordinary - normal if somewhat unhealthy and scrawny - aside from how difficult he found it to ascertain her age. Her behaviour, on the other hand, was outright peculiar, particularly the smile lighting her pale face when she had gazed up at him, and her expressed hope that he was indeed Jason Voorhees. That experience had disturbed him to the core.  _ Nobody  _ was happy to see him, especially not those who knew who he was. The brothers he killed earlier that very day had spoken of a desire to find him so that they could kill him - as insane a desire as any he could imagine, and yet they had greeted his appearance with screams and terror. The girl, on the other hand, had  _ smiled. _

It made no sense to him, and therefore it bothered him.

Standing still as a statue concealed in the camouflaging shadows of the forest, Jason decided to stay to watch her in the hope that further observation might allow him to unravel the tangled mystery that he viewed her to be. She was walking around slowly as she sang very softly, apparently singing just to herself, squatting down to pick up something then going to lay it down upon a pile beside the remains of last night’s bonfire before repeating the process … and then he realised what she was doing. The odd little girl was picking up the cans and other trash littering the clearing -  _ she was doing part of his job for him _ . If he were not so confused and irked by her continuing unwanted presence where the living did not belong, he might have been amused by the situation or even glad not to have to pick up the reeking beer cans himself, but it was difficult for him to feel anything but frustration then.

At least her singing was quiet - ever since the lake returned him from the depths in which he had drowned, his hearing had been almost painfully acute, and he found certain noises particularly alarming and unpleasant. The music blaring from the vehicles and radios that trespassers brought with them cracked into his skull like a blade - a terrible sensation with which he had sufficient familiarity to know just how apt a comparison that was - and their screams pierced his ears horribly. If the girl raised her voice even slightly, he probably would have walked away in anger, but as it was, he was content to stay and watch her until she finished performing part of his task for him, simply hoping that she would finish quickly and leave.

He assumed that she finally was leaving when she walked to the edge of the clearing no more than ten yards from where he stood, still unseen; but instead, he saw her pick up a branch then return to the dead fire. Initially, this further confused him, but his frustration took on an edge of amusement when he observed her using the branch to rake the dead leaves away from the fire, as if she expected the dead campers to return and relight it. He might even have appreciated the effort to ensure the safety of the forest, wasted though it was, if not for his already sour mood. As it was, he instead experienced a sense of relief when she finally stopped picking up trash and sweeping aside leaves, looked around the clearing, then set off upon the trail back to her campsite, leaving the trash in a neat pile that would be easy for him to bag up and dispose of properly. As soon as her retreating figure vanished into the woods, unsure if she would return to pick up the pile of garbage and not wanting to see her again if she did, he hurried to the clearing and began disassembling the tents to clear the site. He had wasted enough of the quickly fading light watching her, although his vision was not impeded much at all by darkness, and he just wanted to be done with the day. It had been far too unsettling.

—

—

Upon returning to her tidy little campsite, Jayne went straight to Rodney to dig out the box of trash bags which she had brought with her so that she would not leave the old, abandoned camp littered with trash as the other campers whose site she had just cleaned up seemed depressingly likely to do. Although she had intended to return immediately to the other campsite to finish her cleanup, hopefully before the campers returned - assuming that they were still alive, of course - instead, she paused to drink some water. Then, she remembered the camp shower which she had spent so much time assembling and filling, so she dipped a finger into the reservoir to test the temperature, smiling when she found the water to be warmer than she expected. She regretted that it had gotten so late, as it meant that she would have to postpone her shower until the next afternoon and she was feeling outright grimy, but she hated going to bed with wet hair. Not only did it turn her hair into a bird’s nest liable to develop dreadlocks that would take her hours to untangle, it also tended to give her the sniffles, which she imagined would be even more likely in the chilly Fall air so far to the north of where she had lived all her life.

She did not know why she was dawdling, but there was an unrecognised and unacknowledged part of her that was trying to draw out the task as if it knew that she would be inundated by memories that would hack at her like knives as soon as she no longer had the activity to distract her - and it was reasonably successful in that endeavour. However, the crescent moon was rising, so Jayne knew that she had to get back to the campsite if she wanted to avoid running into the people staying there. That practical part of her knew that they would not be returning, but she refused to acknowledge it as she cautiously limped back toward the clearing which she had tried to make tidy.

When she finally made it back to the campsite, she was surprised to see that not only had the pile of trash she had made been removed, but the trio of tents had been taken down and removed, as well, along with whatever had been inside of them. Whoever had disassembled the campsite in the time she was gone had even raked dirt over the ashes and swept forest litter over the burnt patch where it had been, thoroughly erasing the signs of recent inhabitation. For a moment, she wondered if she had gotten lost somehow and come to the wrong clearing, but even in the starlit darkness she recognised the trees, so she was certain that she was in the right place. It just seemed so strange to her that people who had kept such a messy campsite would have taken such care in clearing away all evidence of their presence - and that they would have done so as quickly as they had. She did not think that she had been away longer than forty-five minutes.

_ Perhaps seeing the effort that she had put into picking up their litter and making their campfire safe had inspired or shamed them _ , she supposed.

_ Or else someone else entirely had come behind her to clear the site. _

A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of who might have done that, followed by a crashing wave of bitterness. If it had been Jason who had cleared the campsite, then surely that meant that he had killed the campers.

_ If they were worthy of death, why wasn’t I? _

Jayne felt her eyes burning with tears that dripped off the tip of her nose and chin as she slowly trudged back to her campsite. When she made it back, her shins itching from the weeds that obscured much of the trail scratching at them, she could not dredge up enough energy to eat anything for supper, to reignite her campfire, or even to read. Pulling off her boots, she arranged her blankets into a comfortable nest and curled up, hoping that sleep would come quickly to end the awful day.

Perhaps tomorrow would be better.

She highly doubted it.

  
  
  
  
  


—

—

Note: The song which Jayne is singing is “It’s Alright, It’s Okay” by Leah Andreone, and the chapter title is from “Bird on a Wire” by Leonard Cohen


	9. And Who By Fire, Who By Water

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter IX - And Who By Fire, Who By Water**

  
  


The next morning dawned cold and wan, overcast, with a biting wind that ripped through the trees and tore the fragile leaves from the branches, the autumn sun barely visible through thick, grey clouds that threatened a bitter downpour. Prying fingers of chilling wind tore through the tarp beneath which Jayne slept, creeping into the blankets so that they could slide under her shirt through the loose cuffs of the sleeves and through the gaping neckline and sneak up her thighs beneath the legs of the cargo shorts she had been too exhaustedly miserable to remove before curling up in her nest of blankets the night before. That cold touch raised goose prickles along her flesh, driving her to curl up into an even tighter little ball than the one in which she usually slept and to shiver violently, which quickly awakened her. With a low groan, she wrapped herself more tightly in her cocoon of blankets, her movements stiff and jerky as if she were hacking her way through an inundation of thick, clinging swamp-sludge rather than merely pulling a couple blankets around herself, trying to banish the chill even as she blinked away the sleep clouding her vision.

Peering out from beneath the shade of the tarp, she felt a stab of disappointment at the sight of the dark storm clouds angrily rolling across the sky even though normally she loved gloomy days, far preferring them to the bright sunshine that burned her fair skin which completely bypassed the tan phase in favour of turning her a furious crimson that ached with fever and broke out in blisters before sprinkling her nose and cheeks with the freckles she despised because they made her look even younger than she already did.

_ So much for a nice morning shower _ , she thought disgruntledly.

At least her skin was not actually outright itching yet, so she felt that she  _ could  _ put it off for one more day; and, between the cold and the imminent probability of rain, she doubted that the shower she had been anticipating so greedily would happen at all that day.

Well, even if she did not want to waste the sun-warmed water of the camp shower on such a cloudy day - plus, the water in the reservoir probably had cooled off during the night, and she thought it highly unlikely that it would get any warmer when the sun was hidden behind roiling thunderheads, anyway - there always was the lake. The water was incredibly clear, wholly unlike any of the swampy bodies of water that dotted southeastern Louisiana, and she recalled how nice it had felt around her lower leg when she had let it dangle off the dock her first afternoon at the camp. Reluctant to leave the warmth of her nest, she pulled the blankets around herself and scooted to the edge of the tarp so that she could inspect the sky. Judging by the movement of the clouds and the throbbing ache of her formerly broken (actually  _ shattered _ , according to the surgeon who had compared her x-rays to looking at terrazzo floors upon several occasions) and twice surgically-reconstructed forearm that never had properly healed, the rain would not come for about an hour.

_ That should be just enough time for me to scoot down to the lake, scrub up quickly, then hurry back to the campsite and secure it before it starts pouring. _

She knew that it would be uncomfortably cold, but that would be just further incentive to get it done and over with as quickly as she could.

Sighing, she shed her quilt-cocoon and clambered clumsily to her feet, sleep-stiff joints cracking in protest, then picked up her stack of books and carried them over to Rodney. The passenger side door had leaked where the seal was damaged in one of the two wrecks which the old hatchback’s former owner had gotten in since the day Jayne had bought it, and she never had felt like spending the money to get it repaired properly, but it still offered more protection from driving rain than the tarp would, so she put her books and then all but one of the blankets inside for safekeeping - on the driver’s side. She had stored the water- and fireproof lockbox containing her medications behind the driver’s seat, as well, so she quickly downed her morning pills. Upon digging through the back of the car, she found her poncho, a towel, and a bar of fragrance-free hypoallergenic soap, then she dressed in a plain, army green tank top and faded grey soffee shorts despite the chill in the air, having neglected to bring a bathing suit with her up to New Jersey, and pinned her sleep-mussed plaits atop her head so that they would not get wet. Finally, she adjusted the ropes supporting the tarp and staked down the edges so that her shelter would be as watertight as she could make it; then, picking up her walking stick, she hiked as quickly as she could down to the lake.

By the time she reached her destination, already shivering, the sky had grown significantly darker and the wind tearing at her hair threatened to pull her braids loose from the clip. Before venturing out into the lake, she looked around, scanning the surrounding woods for any sign of witnesses. The thought of being watched as she bathed made her skin crawl, especially given what she had done to it the previous day. Seeing nobody, satisfied that she was alone and would not be seen, she limped out onto the creaking, weathered boards. At the end of the rickety old dock, she slid out of her shorts and slipped off her converse then wrapped them and her towel in the poncho, just in case the rain came sooner than she predicted. Biting her bottom lip in trepidation, she gazed down into the clear, green water, darker than before due to the reflection of the thick, grey thunderclouds massing above. It even  _ looked _ cold.  _ Did she really want to do this _ ? A glance down at the itchy, red scratches that marred the pale skin of her childishly skinny, paper-white calves, and she decided that yes, she did.

Clad in just the loose-fitting tank top and panties, she sat down upon the edge of the dock, bracing herself for the chill, and let her lower legs slowly sink into the water.

_ Shit, that’s cold! _

Deciding that it would probably be less tortuous to just submerge herself quickly, she gripped the edge of the dock and allowed gravity to pull her body down, unable to suppress a squeal when the frigid water lapped at her ribs as she lowered herself into the lake. Even there, just off the end of the dock, so close to the shore, she noticed that the lake was too deep for her to feel the bottom with her toes. Using her stronger left hand to cling to the dock so that she would not sink and to allow her some leverage because she had never gotten the knack of floating even though she could swim just barely well enough not to drown, she slid the bar of soap over her skin as quickly as possible, pulling the hem of her tank top over her scab-adorned breasts up to her armpits and squirming her underwear down her thighs so that she could reach every bit of her body before tossing it back onto the dock and hurriedly scrubbing herself with her shaking hands. She knew that it was not much of a bath, and that neither was it the best thing for the lake, even though it was about as non-caustic a soap as there was, but it was better than nothing and should not do any real environmental harm to the ecosystem.

The mineral-rich water stung as it softened the scabs and flowed into the day-old cuts decorating her chest, and when the soap suds slithered their way into the long, shallow wounds, it  _ burned _ , dragging a sharp gasp from her throat. However, this failed to prevent Jayne from scrubbing the perforated skin, although she did so with significantly more care and delicacy than she applied to the rest of her body. The water sliding over the scratches upon her shins stung, as well, and even though she rubbed the soap vigorously over her legs and arms, the sensation was negligible in comparison to how her cut breasts felt.

Not even five minutes after lowering herself into the water, she decided that she was finished - not so much because she felt thoroughly clean, as that would have required her to have shampooed, conditioned, and rinsed her overly-long and overly-thick hair, but rather that she simply could not stand to be submerged up to her neck in frigidly cold water any longer - so she rearranged the meagre clothing that she had worn into the lake then pulled herself back up onto the dock. Much to her chagrin, because of the strong wind coming in over the water, it actually felt colder  _ outside  _ of the water than it had felt while she was neck-deep in it, and she began shivering violently even before she managed to stagger to her feet. Teeth chattering loudly, she towelled herself dry as rapidly as she could before pulling on her shorts and wrapping herself in the damp towel, then she slid her feet into her shoes. Last, even though the rain had not yet begun to fall, she slipped the poncho over her head, hoping that it would work as a barrier against the cutting wind. A glance up at the sky told her that the rain was likely to arrive sooner than she originally had anticipated, possibly while she still was out upon the trail if she did not start walking  _ now _ , so she grabbed her walking stick and scurried off the dock, hurrying back to her campsite and its meagre shelter.

Barely a minute after she grabbed some warm clothes and a book from the car and situated herself beneath the lowered tarp, a brilliant flash of lightning speared across the sky followed barely more than a single breath later by an earth-shaking peal of thunder that rumbled ominously for the span of several heartbeats, and the clouds opened, pouring their heavy liquid burden down upon the earth. The rain was loud as it pounded upon the tarp, falling so heavily that it formed a cacophonous, crackling plastic din without any break in the wall of sound that completely surrounded Jayne. It was no warmer beneath the tarp than it had been outside, either, so she pulled off the poncho and let the wet towel fall to the blue plastic “floor”, then slipped out of her sodden clothing. Even though her dry change of clothes was about the same temperature as the cool ambient air, the leggings and oversized blue plaid flannel shirt felt blissfully warm against her chilled, damp skin.

As she settled into her less-than-snug shelter, finally feeling clean and not so uncomfortably cold, she wondered how long the storm would last, and she momentarily regretted her decision not to bring any devices that could access the internet with her that might have allowed her to check the local radar. However, that moment was exceedingly brief, and she shattered it with a wry chuckle.  _ As if there would be cellular service much less WiFi at Camp Crystal Lake, a place that’s been abandoned some thirty years. _ Putting an eye to one of the brass rings along the edge of the overhead tarp, she examined what little she could see of the sky through the downpour, trying to see if there was a visible edge to the cloud cover where blue sky showed through. While the visibility was too poor to allow her any degree of certainty, she saw nothing to indicate that the storm would be over any time soon, so she wrapped herself up in the one blanket that she had not carried over to the car with the others earlier and lay down upon her belly to read, as she had lowered the highest point of the tarp to such an extent that the top of her head brushed against it when she sat up straight in her effort to waterproof her shelter to the best of her ability. If only she could have afforded a new, state of the art tent like the three she had seen the previous afternoon … but her health insurance alone ate up several hundred dollars of her monthly paycheque, and her monthly medical expenses that were not covered by insurance ate up another seven thousand on average. She considered herself fortunate to earn enough to be able to afford her treatments, but she resented having to spend nearly everything she made just to keep herself alive, leaving next to nothing that she could spend to improve the quality of that life.

_ Not that her finances were a concern anymore _ .

She could foresee no need or use for money during her stay at Camp Crystal Lake, a stay which she anticipated would be very brief. And after that, she would have no need or use for anything at all.

—

—

Decades had passed since Jason’s body had required sleep, which allowed him to patrol the grounds of the long-closed Camp Crystal Lake at all hours, day or night. Further, he did not need to eat or drink, and neither bitterest cold nor blistering heat impacted his ability to fulfill his obligation to the cursed land. Even though his body did not need it, though, there  _ were _ times when he was not required to be elsewhere, so he could rest for a while in the little cabin he had shared with his mother before he drowned and where she had continued to live up until one of the intended victims of her burning need to avenge his death - one of the string of irresponsible teenagers who kept coming to the old camp - had hacked off her head with a single, awful swing of a machete while he looked on in absolute horror from only a short distance away, held back from intervening, perhaps by the same terrible force that had kept him apart from her - cruelly separating him from the only person who had ever loved him or even shown him any kindness in his brief life - during the years after his resurrection, which he had estimated to be close to twenty based upon his recollection of the changing of the seasons and the cycles of the moon. Back then, the passage of time had meant something to him - back then, Jason had still had the hope that he and Mommy would be reunited somehow, someday. But years had passed, he had never been able to comprehend the nature or purpose of the impenetrable, invisible veil that had seemed to exist just to keep him separate from others during those early years, and neither could he understand why it had been torn aside that horrible, horrible night, just in time for him to have to see Mommy die … to watch the warm arms that had held him with such love when he cried in loneliness fall and lie still in the dirt … to see the soft eyes that had never seen him as a monster glazed and fixed in fear and madness … to see the mouth that had murmured comforting assurances to assuage his insecurities and dropped light, soothing kisses upon his forehead every night before he fell asleep gaping wide in a silent scream … 

Jason had never determined what force had held him back from killing Alice Hardy that night, whether it was something inexplicable like whatever had kept him apart from his mother for all those bleak years, or if he simply had been frozen by the dread of the moment, unable to run to her and rooted to the spot by the shock and the pain and the absolute horror and the rage that had boiled away the blood in his veins and turned the air in his lungs to choking dust. He had never felt so helpless before or since, not even while he drowned.

At least he knew that he never would experience  _ that _ sort of pain ever again. Time spent in solitude had whittled his emotions down until little more than anger and frustration remained to him, and he did not mind this, for no other feelings were suited to his strange, joyless existence. As he cared about nothing but his duty, he could not be hurt by cruel words or by loss.

And he still heard Mommy’s voice, urging him to kill the inevitable trespassers just as he had seen one of them kill her.

He just wished that sometimes she would tell him something else - something not full of anger and bitterness, something more like what she used to say to him back when they were both alive and together and as happy as their circumstances had allowed.

Those thoughts, too, had grown less frequent as the decades passed him by, though, his body nearly untouched by the passage of time that slowly was reducing the abandoned, decaying structures that remained of the camp to nothing. If he ever allowed himself to contemplate such things, he might have wondered how long he would go on “living,” duty-bound to kill the irresponsible fools who chose to enter the domain he guarded. But he embraced his bleak existence, developed his routine and kept himself busy tending to his weapons, the land, and his terrifying, bloody defence thereof; and, even at rest, his mind was always occupied with designing traps and alarms, thoughts of how to be more effective in his rôle of defender and executioner.

The morning after his bizarre encounter with the undefinable girl began as nearly every other - he started making his rounds beneath a leaden sky thick with clouds through which the sun’s light barely penetrated. His feet carried him along the old trails with little conscious thought upon his part, the routine ingrained as much in his muscles as in his mind. There was a comfort of sorts in the familiarity of it that eased a bit of his lingering discomfort after the unfamiliar events of the past couple days. He knew every tree in the forest through which he strode, and he recognised the calls of each species of bird and insect, even though he did not know what most properly were called. Not having to speak or communicate with anyone made such gaps in his knowledge irrelevant, anyway. These woods were his home, even more so than the little cabin where he kept his shrine to his beloved mother and his workshop, and he was no less a part of them than were the earth and the streams that crossed it, the trees and bushes, the wildlife, and the lake. 

He paused for a moment to watch a pair of deer drinking from the shallow stream he was about to cross, standing less than two metres from them, close enough to see the faint remnants of white spots dappling the coat of the smaller and thinner of the pair, but they were undisturbed by his proximity, as if they could tell that he would not harm them. He  _ smelled  _ like the forest, only the leather of his gloves, boots, and belt and the faint tang of the sharp steel he always carried setting him apart from the other wildlife, and those slight odours were not enough to mark him as something to be feared and avoided. His large figure weaving between the trees was familiar to all the forest’s denizens, nothing to induce alarm.

_ He belonged. _

He belonged in that forest as he had never belonged in the society of people, when he had been young and different, deformed,  _ reviled _ . The forest accepted him. It always had, even when his mother first had been offered the job as camp cook and moved them into the tiny cabin at the edge of the camp proper. The camp owners had allowed them to live there rent-free in return for Pamela working at the camp during the summer months, and the rest of the year she worked double shifts at the diner in the nearby town, over forty miles away, also owned by the owners of Camp Crystal Lake, along with whatever odd jobs she could find to bring in extra income. Jason had known even as a small child that she did it all for him. The medical treatments that had been required to keep him alive and healthy must have been ruinously expensive for a single mother with no family to help her, way out there in rural New Jersey, he had realised later on in his childhood, shortly before its abrupt, terrible end, and he was eternally, undyingly grateful to Mommy for all the sacrifices that she had made for him. Still, her jobs had not allowed her much time to spend with him, and although he was grateful to her for everything that she did for him, that gratitude had done nothing to assuage his loneliness.

None of the local children would play with him. Some avoided him just because they thought he was stupid and a freak, while others were not allowed near him by their parents, and one early afternoon when Mommy had acquiesced to his begging and let him come along with her to work, he had overheard two ladies sitting in a booth chatting about him from where he had hidden himself away beneath one of the two long tables between the windowed wall lined with booths and the mint-green, Formica-topped lunch counter that faced the grille and deep fryers. Of course he had crept closer, stopping at the edge of the table, his presence masked by the long, green-checkered tablecloth, childish curiosity compelling him to hear what they might have to say about him, a small hope blooming in his chest that they might want to encourage their children to include him in their games. 

Over fifty years later, he could still remember every detail of that early afternoon - “Unchained Melody” by Al Hibbler was playing upon the jukebox, followed by “Too Young” by Nat King Cole, then “Blue Moon” by Frank Sinatra, and Mommy was working at the grille behind the lunch counter, swaying slightly in time with the music as she flipped the sizzling eggs and strips of steak for the man in a red trucker’s hat and dark blue denim overalls over a red flannel shirt who sat at the counter nursing a cup of coffee while waiting for his lunch. A teenage boy with greasy, slicked-back, dark hair wearing jeans with rolled cuffs and a black leather motorcycle jacket over nothing but an undershirt sprawled in the booth closest to the door across from a giggly, freckle-faced girl with her red hair pulled up in a high ponytail who wore a baby pink sweater and a calf-length white skirt, sharing a chocolate malt with only one straw. The heavyset, brunette waitress dressed in a mint green uniform just like Mommy’s, Florence (although everyone called her Florrie), who never said anything unkind to him but who would not make eye contact with him or come within a yard of him, was writing down the order of the stooped old man sitting alone in the booth in the back corner … and Jason still remembered every single word that the ladies had said.

“Oh no, I’d never let my Lottie play with that nasty little Voorhees boy - the Lord only knows what’s wrong with him, and what if it’s catching!” the one with thick, straight, black hair cut into a bob that framed her plump face, emphasising its roundness, who wore a navy blue dress with a line of red buttons down the front and tiny red polka dots speckling the fabric, a red Peter Pan collar, and puffed sleeves cinched tight around her arms midway between her shoulders and her elbows with wide, red cuffs, exclaimed to her friend after glancing around nervously as if seeking to assure herself that Pamela was not within hearing range.

Her friend nodded, perfectly coiffed ash blonde curls bouncing upon the padded shoulders of her similar dress, only hers was a soft, bluish green with a long line of large, white buttons down the front, and the collar and long, fitted sleeves were trimmed in white lace that looked rather like a doily to the little boy beneath the nearby table.

“I know!” she replied then leaned across the table, adding conspiratorially, “Have you seen his  _ hair _ ? I think the boy has  _ mange _ ! Goodness, I can’t imagine what I’d do if Genevieve came home looking like that - all those beautiful golden curls, gone!”

Self-consciously, Jason’s hand had reached up to feel the sparse, slightly-reddish, light blonde hair trailing in wisps over the back of his misshapen skull that hung down to brush against his collar. Even at a very young age, he knew that he was different and ugly, despite what Mommy always told him - he had a mirror, didn’t he, and he had to see his face every morning and every night when he brushed his teeth, so he  _ knew  _ \- but he wasn’t contagious, and he certainly didn’t have mange!

The dark-haired lady shuddered daintily.

“I won’t let my Jonathan anywhere near him, either, you know - and not just from fear what he’s got is catching. He’s retarded or something, and you know those people are  _ dangerous. _ ”

Nodding, the lady in green murmured, “I’m sure - have you heard him trying to talk? I’ve never heard a stutter like that in all my life! I’m so glad Pamela hasn’t put him in school. Can you even imagine?”

“Oh Lord, that’d be just awful! Good children shouldn’t be exposed to things like that - monsters shouldn’t even be sent home from the hospital. Some kind nurse ought to’ve smothered him at birth,” Lottie’s mother declared, her voice barely above a whisper, but Jason could hear her, clear and loud as a church bell. “Who could ever love anything like that? It’d really be a blessing if he’d die soon, even if his mother doesn’t see it now. Haven’t you noticed how sad she always looks? After a while, I’m sure she’ll be  _ relieved _ when he’s gone and she can move on to a happier life.”

Although he had already been taunted with almost every cruel name imaginable - dunce, jerk, blockhead, sissy, retard, momma’s boy, dolt, elephant boy (one Jason did not understand as he had never heard of Joseph Merrick, but he recognised it as an insult nonetheless), idiot, cockroach, dummy, ugly, stupid, freak of nature, numbskull, moron, gross, lamebrain, dimwit … also tattletale and rat fink that one time when he told Mommy about the teasing and pushing, and she went to their parents to ask that their children stop only to be told she should keep her son inside if she did not want him to be teased … and so, so many others - by the children who he had shyly approached in the hope of kindling friendship, that was the first time Jason had heard anyone call him a  _ monster _ . For some reason, that was even worse than the others. It felt as if the lady’s voice were a blade sharpened upon her cruelty, and she had cut him over and over, slashing at him with her words, before she named the blade “monster” then stabbed it between his ribs, plunging it straight into his heart.

After darting another nervous glance across the room at Pamela’s back to ensure that she would not overhear, the blonde remarked, “Poor Pamela. It’s really so sad. She’s such a sweet lady - she really doesn’t deserve to be burdened with that. I heard that boy’s why her husband left her, too, and as terrible as it sounds, God as my witness, I can’t say as I blame him. Shucks, I think Artie’d do the same to me. At least she’s still young and nice-looking, though, so she’s got a chance at a better life once that boy’s finally gone to be with God.” 

“Amen to that!”

Right after the dark-haired lady’s emphatic agreement, upon noticing that Pamela had turned around to serve the man at the counter his steak, cheese, and bell pepper omelette, the ladies fell silent. 

Hot tears had burned in Jason’s mismatched eyes, scalding his cheeks in their descent, and he sniffled quietly.  _ He wasn’t dangerous or a monster _ ! He knew that he was far from the smartest child, but it wasn’t his fault that he had a hard time speaking clearly, and he didn’t think he was  _ that  _ stupid. His crooked jaw and twisted lips just made it difficult to form the words he wanted to say, and his shyness made it almost impossible to get them out, worsening his stutter.  _ But that didn’t mean that he should  _ die _ , did it _ ? And that last part …  _ would Mommy really be happier if he were dead _ ? He knew that she loved him and that everything she did, all the long, tiring hours that she worked, it all was for him. He was old enough to know that his treatments were expensive, and without him she would have enough money to go to see the moving picture shows at the small theatre in town and maybe buy a pretty dress like the ones the ladies were wearing -  _ and she would look much prettier in it than they did _ , he thought. Mommy was the prettiest lady he knew.  _ Maybe she could make friends and go out dancing with them on Saturday nights. Maybe Daddy would even come back if he were gone, and then they could have a new baby. One who wasn’t ugly and deformed and stupid and expensive. _

Then a horrible thought crept up on him.  _ What if Mommy actually  _ resented _ having to do all that for him? What if she resented  _ him _? What if she was fibbing when she told him that she loved him and that she didn’t mind working so hard and coming home with blistered burns on her hands and wrists and aching feet that he’d sit on the floor rubbing for her while she read to him at night - saying she didn’t mind it because there was nothing at all that she wouldn’t do for him? _

Jason wiped at his eyes and nose with his sleeve then buried his face in his hands to muffle the sobs he could feel welling up through the tightness burning inside his chest.

_ The ladies were probably right - Mommy  _ would _ have a better life without him. _

Whatever else the ladies might have said thereafter, Jason did not hear it over the blood pounding in his malformed head and his own muffled whimpers. He was not merely sad - he  _ ached  _ with despair. It felt like they had broken something inside of him irrevocably that had shifted him off balance and washed out the ground beneath the foundation of his Self, allowing it to tilt and crumble, taking him down with it as it collapsed.

Unable to bring himself to crawl out from beneath the table, not wanting to be seen or caught spying which he knew was a bad thing to do, he had waited for the ladies to leave, quietly crying into his sleeves until the tears soaked through the cloth to wet his wrists. When they were gone and he finally emerged, his crooked, green-hazel eyes red and swollen almost shut in a bloodless face that glistened wetly beneath the artificial light, Mommy had come running out from behind the counter to sweep him up into a tight embrace. Her rushing questions about what was wrong caused his stomach to clench violently with both his new uncertainty of her sincerity and the guilt he felt for upsetting and worrying her so much, and he stiffened in her arms, close to retching and unable to reply. However, her soft reassurances while she mopped up his wet face with her starched white apron and her gentle hand stroking his baby-fine hair were soothing, and his body finally relaxed again, crumpling against her. But the feeling of being held supported within the warmth of her embrace when his legs were too wobbly to hold him upright just brought on another torrent of tears. Even though he really was too big for her to pick up, she did so anyway, carrying him over to the nearest booth - the one so recently vacated by the ladies who said that both he and Mommy would be better off if he were dead - where she sat down, cradling him upon her lap while the deep sobs torn from the depths of his soul wracked his body. Stroking his hair and his back to soothe him, she told him that whatever it was that had upset him would be okay and that she loved her special, special boy, and that she would be there for him always, no matter what.

Jason had wanted to believe her, had wanted to trust her quiet assurances that she loved him forever, more than he had wanted anything in his life, even more than he wanted to have a normal face and to be a normal boy with a normal life, but the ladies had planted a seed of doubt within his heart and watered it with the cruel reality of his situation. He could not deny their assertions that Mommy would be better off without him, because he recognised that he was an unbearable burden and that she had done nothing to deserve to carry that.

He had been eight years old. Less than two and a half years later, he would be dead, and his mother’s frenzied grief would prove just how wrong those ladies had been even before it was transformed into embittered, murderous rage, but Jason was not there to see that confirmation of her undying love for him.

But he knew it. Even after the crop of doubt sewn in his fragile young heart had ripened within him, everything that Pamela Voorhees did proved her devotion to her precious little boy, and by the time of his first death, his worries and distrust had faded away in the face of her pure, selfless love.

Jason had never belonged out there among people who were too blinded by their own shallow pettiness to recognise the depth and sincerity of his mother’s love for him.

It was different, though, in the forest. The trees and animals did not care that his face was deformed or that he found it difficult to speak clearly - any more than they cared that he did not speak at all after his resurrection. They did not judge him for being poor and wearing ill-fitting, thrift store clothes that Mommy mended for him without complaint whenever he tore them, and they did not look down on him for being taught at home in his mother’s scant spare time instead of attending school like the other children. There was nobody there to taunt him or push him down face-first into mud puddles. He could run around, climb trees, build himself (ineffective) fishing rods using branches, string, and safety pins as hooks, just be a normal, active little boy - all without being tormented.

But he had been lonely.

Although he never gave up and accepted that he would never have any friends with whom to play, Jason was forced by circumstances to play alone, always; therefore, he came to excel at solitary activities. Because he was something of a perfectionist and possessed remarkable patience for a child so young, he focused intently upon everything he did and put forth effort into every goal he set for himself, practicing by himself until he had achieved his goal. Even though his uneven, lopsided eyes rendered his depth perception unreliable (and made reading difficult albeit not impossible for him), he went outside almost every day with the bow and arrows that Mommy had given him for his eighth birthday, practicing doggedly until he became so adept at shooting that he never missed the centre of where he aimed at any target, and he taught himself to make and fletch his own arrows. He developed equal accuracy with darts and even practiced throwing knives, figuring out the proper grip and technique on his own, without any guidance. He also enjoyed building things, working with wood and wire, carving himself toys to play with out of fallen branches and even constructing himself a treehouse that had a pulley system for carrying heavy items up into the fort that he erected in the great scarlet oak behind the house using scavenged wood and other materials that he had found lying around abandoned at the camp. Despite how unprofessional it looked, his mother had lavished him with praise as if he had built one of the incredible stone castles illustrated in some of the storybooks she read to him at night.

Those skills developed during a solitary childhood had come to serve him well in the rôle he was to play after his death, although he took no pride in his abilities, seeing them as mere necessities to fulfilling his obligation to his mother’s memory and to the land where they both had died.

He tried never to think about his childhood, preferring to keep his mind empty of everything but his duty, as even the best memories of when he and his mother were alone together and content induced pain - agonising pain that manifested itself both emotionally and physically - that was near-crippling in its intensity, reminding him of his loss and what might have been had Fate been kinder to the Voorhees family. Alongside all of his emotions apart from his ubiquitous anger and frustration, the pervasive loneliness that had characterised his childhood had long since faded away into nothingness.

He liked it better that way.

Shortly after Jason found himself back upon the lake trail that would bring him to the turnoff leading back to his home, a blinding flash of white light forked across the night-dark sky, followed within a heartbeat’s span by a roaring crack of thunder that growled like some great beast as it rolled on and on, seeming to shake the earth in its ferocity, and then the rain pelted him, instantly becoming a heavy deluge that threatened hail. Neither rain nor hail actually affected him, although both could do a number upon his traps, so he knew that he would be busy once the storm passed through and he could go inspect the damage it wrought. Thunderstorms struck the camp less frequently during the Fall than during the Spring and Summer months, but the Fall storms made up for that comparative infrequency with their destructive intensity. The ropes supporting and within his traps tended to stretch when soaked through, and although the brightly colourful modern climbing rope that he acquired from the dead was significantly more resistant to that, it was far more difficult for him to disguise and hide it from wary intruders than old-fashioned rope that came in pale shades of beige and white which he easily could stain with grass and dirt until it was barely visible to the human eye, so he still utilised ordinary rope in most of his traps. That meant that he had to check each one after every storm, but he did not mind the time spent thereupon. Further, when the rain fell heavily for an extended period, for several hours or even days straight, the ground upon which several of the traps sat could wash out, rendering them ineffective or even carrying them away from the trails where they were most likely to catch an intruder. It was a rarity for Jason to have any time when he was not busy, and again, he did not mind this. He had his routine, and he was quite comfortable existing within it.

Rather than making the turn toward the cabin, an impulse directed him to remain upon the path that eventually led to the main entrance to the camp - but that was not the destination he had in mind. Despite the blinding downpour that had saturated his clothes almost instantly and was transforming the ground into thick mud that sucked at his heavy, once-black work boots with every purposeful, long-legged stride, it did not take him long to reach the clearing where the blue tarp had been strung up between three trees at a safe distance from the fire pit, hoping to find it empty - the tarp and the aluminum and canvas-webbing folding chair removed and packed up into the rust-pocked little teal hatchback, the strange contraption of hoses and a water container hung from a tree limb taken down and absent, and the evidence of the fire pit erased from the ground. It surprised him to realise that he expected that the girl would be so thorough in disassembling her campsite - even though he did not give trespassers the chance to clean up after themselves, inevitably killing them before they were ready to pack up their belongings and leave, his gut told him that they would have left obvious evidence of their presence and a mess for him to clean, regardless. Responsible, careful people simply did not venture to Camp Crystal Lake.

Which was a great part of the conundrum the peculiar girl’s presence represented.

A presence that apparently was going to continue a while longer.

Jason felt a stab of disappointment when he reached the clearing and saw that the tiny hatchback and the blue tarp were still there, that the threat of the storm had not been any more sufficient to drive her away than being confronted by him in the flesh the day before had been. The girl had lowered the tarp that formed the roof of her shelter by several feet and staked down the edges that now reached the ground in an effort to block out the wind-driven rain. Although he knew that definitely offered her more protection from the elements than it would have as she initially had erected it, he did not doubt that water was managing to seep in between the two tarps that were not sealed together. She would be cold and wet, the conditions only getting worse the longer the storm persisted.

_ Good _ .

While he did not wish any actual harm upon her, he hoped that her experience in the storm would be unpleasant enough to drive her to leave.

His curiosity satisfied, Jason turned and followed the boobytrapped path leading back to his cabin to wait out the storm. While the weather had no effect upon him, there was little for him to do until the rain passed and he could go out again to assess and address whatever damage it might have caused. In the meantime, there were several tasks that he could address back home - he had blades to sharpen and oil, some three dozen arrows which he had fashioned that still needed to be fletched, and he intended to create another bank of bells so that he could extend his makeshift alarm system over a larger portion of the four-square-mile territory that he protected. He did not want to be surprised again by the sight of an intruder sitting upon the dock like how he first had found the girl two days earlier.

—

—

Reading “The Dunwich Horror” in her well-loved, dog-eared, and personally hand-annotated copy of the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft while lying flat upon her belly with her knees bent so that her calves almost met her thighs, beneath the low ceiling of the tarp, a ceiling only made lower and lower as the saturated ropes suspending it between the trees stretched beneath the weight, Jayne listened to the storm. The wind howled frantically as it whipped through creaking branches and the rain fell so heavily that she could not distinguish the sounds of any individual drops falling upon the blue plastic as they all merged together into a steady, ceaseless roar. Rivulets of water were creeping in through the gaps between the two tarps that formed her shelter, but there really was nothing she could do about it except try to brush the water away with her hands before it could soak into the blanket in which she was cocooning herself for warmth. At this time of year, it was still in the high-70s to mid-80s back home, whereas she supposed that the temperature at Crystal Lake must have dropped into the low-40s with the thunderstorm, and she wondered if it might even sleet if it grew any colder.

Although she adored snow, as it was rare enough in southeastern Louisiana to be a novelty and the ground temperature never got cold enough for it to stick and create truly hazardous conditions, she was not fond of sleet, and she hoped that this storm did not herald the coming of a bitterly cold winter. However … she recalled having read somewhere that succumbing to hypothermia was supposed to be a remarkably peaceful way to die - that the cold was absolutely piercing for a while, but then the victim would stop shivering, warmth and a sense of peace flooding through them in the last minutes before they slipped into a sleep from which there was no awakening. Really, aside from the extended period of shivering misery, it sounded quite pleasant as far as deaths went to Jayne, and she decided that once the rain stopped she would go to her car and read the list of cautions the pharmacist always stapled to the bags containing her monthly supply of pills (which she only threw out once she picked up her refills, even though she had read them all more than once and her prescriptions rarely changed, so keeping them around had no real purpose aside from her taking comfort in the fact that they would be there to check should an issue arise) to see if any of her medications would make her more susceptible to the cold.

It was always good to have options, as her late father always used to tell her.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene from Jason’s childhood is only one of many such awful experiences I imagine he had prior to his tragic death. The 1950s were not a good time for the disabled, mentally or physically, and the mentally challenged still were commonly viewed as dangerous.  
> Plus, Pamela was only 16 when she had Jason ...  
> It really is a tragedy in my mind, the whole F13th series ...


	10. Chapter X: Cursed and Damned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and criticism are welcome!

**l’Enfer C’est les Autres**

**Chapter X - Cursed and Damned**

The storm assaulting Crystal Lake showed no sign of abating until several hours after the sun had descended beneath the horizon, as if the great star itself had given up on its light touching the cursed surroundings of that fathomless lake of clear water and impenetrable, dark secrets. Well before the viciously roaring gusts of wind and torrents of rain had subsided to a light sprinkle, all of Jayne’s attempts to stay dry and warm had failed. At least two centimetres of standing water sat upon the tarp that formed the floor of her shelter, slowly crawling up fabric to saturate the bottom third of her blanket along with her woollen socks, halfway up the shins of her leggings, and even her underwear, leaving her cold and uncomfortable where she huddled in a tight little ball in an ineffective attempt to conserve her body heat. Even sitting upon her poncho had proved ineffective to keep her dry. Very little of what she had believed to be her well thought out and carefully considered trip to the long-abandoned summer camp seemed to be turning out as she had anticipated when planning her journey up to New Jersey, despite how perfectly everything had appeared to fall into place, at least initially. Even the most improbable of the aspects that had motivated her to choose Camp Crystal Lake as her destination (which  _ was _ her main motivation for coming here, however unlikely it was in reality) had proved to be true - by some black twist of Fate’s inscrutable threat, these woods were indeed haunted by an alarmingly large, intimidating man wielding a machete who hid his face behind an old, once-white hockey mask with scarlet markings.

Miraculously, it had turned out that the drowned boy who would not stay dead, Jason Voorhees, actually was real, and for a few moments out there upon the dock over that lovely, deadly body of water, Jayne had given in to temptation, had felt the sort of hope that her life long had taught her to fight against or ignore flood through her. Her pain, no doubt, would flare brighter than she ever before had experienced, but then it would have been  _ over _ , it  _ all _ would have been over, and she would have learnt the answer to the great mystery: whether it is the peace and relief and unending dark nothingness that she craved with ravenous desperation that comes after life has ended … or something else. She was ready to learn that answer, prepared to face the endless oblivion of nonexistence or whatever else there was. But Jason had not done what every source she had found in her research declared that he would do. The blade had not pierced her body. Instead, he had turned his back upon her and strode away, denying her the salvation she sought from him, silently damning her by his refusal to free her from the strangling noose that the mortal coil had become, leaving her hanging there, helpless and choking.

_ She should have known better _ .

_ Why would this have been any different from everything else she had ever attempted in her search for an end to the suffering and relentlessly unceasing pain that defined her life, after all _ ? 

The countless medical specialists who she had seen did not save her. The treatments and the medications that they prescribed kept her alive and reduced some of the worst symptoms to a point where she was able to “function” and even to work, albeit only from home and upon her own schedule, but she did not consider her existence to be the same thing as “living.”

_ Why would a merciless dealer of death have granted her the mercy she sought from him? _

And now, instead of being the infamous Camp Blood Killer’s latest victim as she had intended by making the journey to this haunted place where the wise feared to set foot, she was sitting in damp clothing, huddled up within the loveless embrace of a cold, wet blanket upon a cold, wet tarp in the middle of a cursed forest as a storm that doubtless heralded a cold front’s arrival finally began to subside.

_ At least she could look forward to building a fire, boiling herself another mug of tea, and getting warm again. _

At that thought, the edges of Jayne’s lips began to turn up into the beginnings of a smile, right up until the awful realisation that she had failed to protect any of her supply of wood and kindling from the rain crept up from behind her and wrapped its chilled, clammy fingers around her neck, throttling her with the knowledge her stupid, thoughtless error. There would be no warming campfire for her before which she could sit and read tonight. A seasoned camper like she was never should have made such a rookie mistake …  _ but of course she had _ . Nothing was allowed to go right in her life, and nearly all of it was due to her own errors, her own poor choices, her own misjudgments, perhaps the very  _ wrongness  _ of her existing at all - or so it seemed to her. With the exception of the autoimmune disease that was taking its time in destroying her from the inside out - her own defences from sickness that had turned against her by corrupting one body system or organ at a time, torturing her while it inexorably crippled her, that was slowly, oh! so slowly and torturously dragging her along behind it upon a floor jagged with splinters and embedded with sharp nails and razor blades that caught in her skin and ripped through her scarred flesh, down that long, bleak, sightless corridor that only leads to a longed-for death that remained hovering just beyond her reach, tauntingly far away - her exhaustion-and-pain-warped mind was able to twist each cause of her various agonies until it convinced her that they all were her fault. Of course, her therapists insisted that this was irrational thinking, but that logic had little effect upon what she actually  **believed** . At her lowest points, Jayne occasionally even managed to convince herself that the lupus itself was her fault, that even at the moment she was conceived, the great forces of the universe had known that the blob of cells soon to grow within her mother’s womb into a girl was going to be awful, too awful, an abomination of profound  _ wrongness _ undeserving of personhood, so they had played with the genetic material from which she was composed, manipulated it so as to ensure that her body would punish her ceaselessly, every single day, for how  _ wrong _ she would be once born, because all that she deserved was suffering.

If she had not believed that  _ entirely _ during the pathetic semblance of a life that she had left behind, her experiences at Camp Crystal Lake were enough to convince her of its truth.

_ Otherwise, wouldn’t she be dead now by that large, gloved hand? _

She knew that she should be a corpse now, just wet meat and fragile bone disposed of however the undying murderer saw fit; and yet, horribly, she still was alive, shivering beneath a tarp stretched out across land where the living are not welcome and listening to the slowing patter of raindrops echoing against blue plastic, hollow with bitter disappointment.

_ How could one person have been through as much shit in so short a life  _ without _ being cursed and damned? _

It really did strike her as ridiculous, the sheer number of terrible things that had happened in her life, the outright absurd volume of hell that she had endured. The thought that if she were a character in a novel or movie, people would have begun  _ laughing  _ after a point, probably only a little less than a decade before this particular low point, at just how  _ many _ things had gone wrong in her life, came to her again - really, it was patently unbelievable. Even the dramatic  _ Lifetime  _ movies her mother used to watch, as over-the-top and over-dramatised and therefore  _ silly _ as they tended to be, probably would not go as far into disaster after disaster as her real life had done, like some Escher-inspired rollercoaster with soaring drops into seemingly eternally-spiralling loops and no end to the track. Hellfuck,  _ she _ sometimes laughed about it herself - wildly, lunaticly, until tears streaked her sunken cheeks and stained her collar, but there was no humour in her laughter. It was the mirthless sound of internalised bitterness given voice, harsh and mocking, tearing at her vocal cords with barbed hooks.

_ How many profoundly horrible experiences could one person really have in their life? _

As far as Jayne could tell, there really only was one explanation for it all, although it was sufficiently far-fetched that the logical side of her mind rebelled against accepting it. But logic and reality are not the conjoined twins that most seem to believe them to be. Indubitably, they are related, but more in the sense of fourth cousins twice removed who sit in the same room but not at the same table and who might exchange a cordially polite yet unfelt, shallow greeting during family reunions. Logic is a human invention, nothing more, an attempt to give rules to something truly wild that might appear to submit to humanity’s dominion, but that adherence to the laws humans invented to define and control is no more than a façade, a mask, a trick. And whenever humanity grows complacent in its supposed governance and false comprehension, reality will defy that ephemerally thin logic, turning around and biting those who place all their belief and trust therein.

It might be illogical or even irrational, but Jayne knew that she saw hints of the truth beneath reality’s biddable, apparently constrained and governable façade.

_ Cursed and damned.  _ That’s _ what she was. _

The nuns at the all-girls Roman Catholic kindergarten where her parents had sent her were the ones who put that particular idea into her mind, and there it had festered, a sort of soul-rotting, cancerous infection metastasising until the putrescent, pulsating tumours grew far too large for her to ignore. Jayne was a left-handed redhead, the only such in her smallish preschool class, and therefore she stood out amongst her peers in the eyes of the older nuns. That she was inquisitive and imaginative although never outright confrontational had not helped her, either. Elderly Mother Superior had made certain that Jayne knew that the left is the mark of the Devil, thus those who are dominant to the left are marked by  damnation , and as Judas Iscariot who betrayed “ _ Our Lord Jesus Christ” _ had red hair according to doctrine (as unlikely as Jayne later determined that to be based upon the geographical location and ethnicity of those biblical figures) all redheads ever after were born  cursed in the eyes of the Christian God. Although Jayne did not believe in either God or Satan, and it was very possible that she never had, the old woman’s searing words never had left her.

That deeply-ingrained Catholic guilt seemed impossible for her to shake. As extreme and almost ludicrous as the amount of terrible things that had happened to her might have been, Jayne knew that there were people whose lives were punctuated with experiences far more terrible than hers, and whenever she thought of that, her guilt leapt forth like a wolf, pouncing upon her and worrying her sense of Self in its slavering jaws, chewing and gnawing until she submitted to it once more. If the reports which she had read about the Camp Blood Killer were true, as she was coming to believe they must be after seeing and even speaking to the solid apparition, then Jason Voorhees was someone who had suffered more and worse than she had in his too-short life and his long existence thereafter - born with disfiguring deformities at a time when medical treatments for such conditions were barbaric at worst and at best were far more limited than now, and the assumptions people made about the afflicted during that time were cruel, extreme, and often wrong; raised by a teenage single mother whose husband had abandoned them when the boy likely was too young to remember anything about his father, growing up in a rural area with few if any resources for a struggling family, not to mention that this was in an era when that was far more difficult (not that it ever has been an easy thing to raise a child alone, but at least it no longer was judged so harshly or viewed as a personal and moral failure); not allowed to attend school which undoubtedly was meant for his safety but which still served to isolate the child even further; and then he was allowed to drown at summer camp upon his 11th birthday due to the negligence of the counsellors who had been charged with watching him, possibly after being pushed off the end of the dock by his fellow campers … but the poor child had been denied peace even in death, as twenty-two years later to the day, his grief-maddened mother had been beheaded by the last of her intended victims when the son of the original owners of Camp Crystal Lake foolishly attempted to re-open the cursed place to children despite the tragedies and deaths that haunted it, and if the stories were true, Jason had borne witness to her violent, gory death, and then apparently he had taken up her cause, killing those who dared to disturb the quiet of the land where he and Pamela had died, and in turn being attacked and allegedly even killed by several of his victims over the years. 

She might not have known the exact reasons why Jason killed or why he kept coming back from death, but somehow Jayne felt oddly certain that existing in that state brought him no joy. If he took pleasure in killing, she doubted that he would have turned and walked away from her when he found her out there upon the dock … unless he was such a sadist that somehow - perhaps through whatever mystical force kept him however alive he was after his deaths - he had known what she so desperately desired from him, and therefore, in a monster’s ineffable cruelty, he had decided to deny it to her. That thought sent a shiver racing down her spine which had nothing to do with the chill air nipping at her through her damp clothes. While she had found no reports alleging that he tortured his victims prior to killing them, there were no living eyewitnesses to the vast majority of his murders, either, so it  _ was  _ possible, even though what little of the survivors’ accounts she had managed to find in her research implied that Jason simply tried to kill his victims as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Although Jayne could not imagine what forces imbued the murderer with “life” or how they accomplished that impossible feat, and even if he somehow had survived drowning then grew into a man in total isolation from humanity in the woods surrounding the then-abandoned camp, she knew that Jason  _ had _ died at the very least twice - once at the end of the massacre at Higgins Haven when the EMTs brought his body to the morgue after one of his victims buried a hatchet in his skull and a doctor declared him dead, mere hours before he slaughtered several people in the hospital before breaking out and going on yet another spree of murder, and again the very next evening after he had slaughtered that nearly a dozen more people when a machete was driven through his eye socket and deep into his brain by a twelve-year-old boy, after which he again was pronounced dead by medical professionals and even was buried in a local cemetery where he spent  _ at least _ five years in the grave, until something or someone brought him back. The lack of mysterious disappearances or mass slaughters during that period appeared to confirm that he had been dead and buried. Had Jayne not grown up so close to New Orleans, that beautiful, haunted, deeply-flawed gem of a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River known for its wrought iron-adorned architecture, incredible food, music, wild revelries, and the old cemeteries where the dead rested above-ground inside their family crypts that encircled the oldest neighbourhoods like silent charnel cities of corpses, Jayne might have been less inclined to believe that a dead boy could grow up to become a dead man who murdered anyone who trespassed upon the ground he stalked. However, even if she could not begin to comprehend how he still haunted the long-abandoned site of the old summer camp, she had no difficulty accepting the reality of Jason and what he was. While his face had been hidden by the battered old hockey mask and his body was mostly concealed by his tattered clothing, he had not moved like a man who was over sixty years old, which lent further credence to the stories that he was something not entirely mortal, something not fully human.

Trying (and failing) to get comfortable despite the pitiable conditions beneath the tarp, she shifted around, only to be startled by a sneeze.

“Oh,  _ hellfuck _ ,” she grumbled.

_ Of course she would get sick. _

—

—

Despite the damage he knew it likely was inflicting upon his traps and snares, Jason was pleased by the thunderstorm’s ferocity and longevity. Not even the reckless, irresponsible sort of people who were drawn to visit his domain tended to show up when the weather was so severe, which allowed him to focus the entirety of his attention upon the many tasks that he could and indeed should perform around his cabin without much of him having to remain alert for any sign of intruders. Even though he had nothing but time, he never seemed to have enough of it to accomplish everything that required his attention upon the four square miles that he considered to be his land. However, despite knowing what tasks he ought to be performing, all that he seemed capable of doing right now was pacing back and forth across the length of the front room.

Before he died the second time, at the young hand of Tommy Jarvis, he had not fully comprehended his condition - that his body no longer was a slave to the needs and drives of the living such as food, sleep, and shelter - and during the long years in which he was kept separate and completely alone by that cruel, invisible yet impenetrable barrier, kept away from his mother and from anyone else, his existence had been reduced to little more than desperate scrabbling to meet those supposed needs. He had subsisted upon whatever meagre scraps the forest provided, fruits and berries in their seasons, the meat of whatever animals he could trap or shoot, little more than grass and leaves at times, and even dirt when he found nothing else to fill his stomach, eating merely out of habit and Mommy’s remembered words telling him that he needed to eat three meals a day if he wanted to grow up to be big and strong rather than true hunger; and, during the long, cold, dark winter months when nothing grew and the animals were in hiding or hibernation, he had been driven to leave the forest and trudge through thick snow for miles to the town where he scavenged through trash cans and dumpsters in search of sustenance. Had he not already been dead, he never would have survived that first winter. No sickly, delicate eleven-year-old boy who always had been protected and kept close by his mother could have, no matter how determined or skilled. Jason knew that, now.

Still, the skills he was forced to develop over those two decades of complete, abject solitude and reliance upon nobody but himself came to serve him well after the veil that separated him from the realm of the living was torn asunder that awful night when Alice Hardy murdered Mommy, when Pamela Voorhees’ need for vengeance was passed on to him - that inheritance of revenge and death which she gave to him. The snares and traps which he had taught himself to build and set in order to provide himself with the meat he had believed his growing body needed easily were converted into forms that would catch his human prey. His youthful passions for archery and knife-throwing allowed him to kill even when his victims managed to evade the reach of any hand-held weapon or his immensely powerful hands themselves. Even the process of building his ramshackle little cabin deep in the woods from whatever scraps of metal, lumber, glass, and plastic sheeting he could find taught him the art of improvisation, how best to make use of whatever he found.  _ Anything _ could become a deadly weapon in his hands.

Because of the desperate, precarious nature of his (unnecessary, as it turned out) struggle to survive those first two decades after he drowned, Jason had little time to attend to such things as organisation during that period. The cabin he constructed in those early years to protect himself from the elements had been a foul, putrid, perpetually-leaking little hellhole inundated with mildew and rot almost from the beginning, but it was more comfortable than being exposed to the cutting winds of icy winter or the blinding heat of the summer sun day and night should have been, and he had been too preoccupied with trying to keep himself fed, with keeping himself  _ alive  _ so that one beautiful day he could be reunited with Mommy, to allow the deplorable condition of his home to bother him. There was no trash service so deep in the forest, so the garbage of his “life” built up until he could muster the courage to bag it all up and carry it to the closest dumpster he could find at the edges of town, generally whenever he had been unable to find anything that even remotely resembled food for over a week and thought that he needed to go there to scrounge up something edible anyway, dreading encountering another person the entire time he was away from protective isolation of the abandoned camp. He did not want to be seen. The taunting laughter of those who had watched him drown still rang in his ears, and even adults had not reacted with much more kindness than children to the sight of him and his disfigurement - which was what drove him to hide his face beneath a burlap sack. Not that he ever  _ had _ been seen until after the awful night when that monstrous girl killed Mommy. The veil was too thick, and although he occasionally saw others, somehow they never had seemed to see him.

His squalid, hardscrabble existence during that time had been nightmarish at best, and he could not count the number of nights that he had fallen into a restless, shallow sleep upon a filthy pile of clothes salvaged from the trash sobbing for his mother during the earliest years, but it had hardened him, moulded his once-frail body into a relentless, unyielding tower of murderous strength. It was a crucible in which that scared, lonely, helpless little boy who was hounded by the taunts and jeers of his fellow children even into death had been forged into the force of Nature, the not-quite-living and yet not-quite-dead embodiment of Vengeance and Death Incarnate, that he was today. Jason was not glad to have endured those formative experiences - in truth, he doubted if he could remember how it was to feel truly  _ glad _ of anything - but he acknowledged the purpose that they had served in making him into the brutally effective, efficient creature that he had become.

In the first five years after his mother’s death, his “life” was no easier than it was before his ability to interact with others was restored. It took him over two moons to track down his mother’s killer in the boarding house to which the wicked, red-haired girl had retreated after the bloody events which Mommy had orchestrated upon what would have been his 33rd birthday had he not drowned, and to this day he still did not know exactly  _ how  _ he had managed to find where Alice tried to hide herself away from her unforgivable sin. However, far too many of the events that characterised his strange existence seemingly were impossible, often defying even the very laws of Nature herself - there were too many impossible, inexplicable happenings for him to waste much time upon pondering the “hows” of what he was and what he did, even if his perpetually-active mind were given to such analysis, which it was not. After Alice’s death and her body’s removal to join his beloved mother’s severed head in the shrine that he built to Mommy’s memory within his squalid little cabin, only a few people had dared to visit the site of the abandoned camp, mostly vagrants he had surmised, judging by their appearances which were nearly as ragged and marked by desperation as his own. These few souls were dispatched with ease, and nobody ever had come searching for them. 

Then, only a few years after he tracked down and killed Alice, brown-haired, giggly Chris Higgins had come to Crystal Lake with her family to stay in their summer home right at the border of his territory. Seeing the girl’s confident smiles and hearing her thoughtless, uncaring laughter so close to where he had died, so close to where his mother had been  _ murdered _ by a similarly blithe and oblivious girl, had incited a searing bonfire of rage within him, flames that could be quenched only in a shower of blood. Her blood. And Mommy had encouraged his fury, whispering through his mind that the brunette teenager had to die, that he must kill her from the moment she crossed the unmarked but not unfelt line separating the Higgins property from his own. Late one night, Chris had fled into the forest and she fell asleep beneath the spreading boughs of an oak tree, and Jason had believed that this was his chance to obey his mother and the burning need within him, his chance to kill the girl, to punish her for the disrespect she showed by her giggling and flirting in so sacred a place. Once she awakened, he had pounced, but while she fought like a wildcat against his attempts to kill her and even had managed to disarm him by kicking his knife from his hand, he accidentally had knocked her unconscious or perhaps her terror had overwhelmed her and dragged her into unconsciousness; unable to end her life when she was unaware of the punishment her sacrilege demanded, he had begun to drag her toward his home, to sacrifice her before his mother’s holy shrine, hoping that if he performed the act there, he might be able to feel Mommy’s pride that he had done what she commanded him to do. Much to his frustration, just as Chris was coming back to reality, finally, so close to his run-down shack, before he could drag her the rest of the way there then wrap his hands around her slender throat and squeeze until the whites of her eyes turned crimson with blood and her face turned dark, until the delicate hands that inevitably would beat at his unshrouded face and chest as harmlessly as butterfly wings fell still, until the frantic pulse he would have felt beating against his squeezing fingers ceased, he had heard the sound of someone approaching. Never having attempted to kill two people at once before, especially not while unarmed, Jason had fled,  _ knowing _ deep within himself that he would have another opportunity to punish the girl for her unspeakable sins. Mommy had been disappointed in his failure, he knew, but he thought that she understood.

Following his thwarted attempt to kill the Higgins girl, the area surrounding Crystal Lake returned to the quiet peace that had settled over the derelict property for many more moons, but despite the rarity of disturbances by trespassers during that period, Jason’s existence then was far from peaceful - it, too, reverted to the desperation of trying to survive on his own deep in the forest. And then a whole group of young people, trespassers,  _ violators _ , arrived to stay at Packanack Lodge at the edge of the property he guarded, despite the large section of a fallen tree that he had dragged for nearly a mile in order to block the road leading to  _ his _ land. At first, he had considered simply leaving them be, but then a pair of them intruded upon the grounds of the camp itself, followed almost immediately by another, a police officer who actually had dared to enter his  _ home _ , the site of Pamela Voorhees’ sacred shrine, the home of the holiest of his relics of his sainted mother who had been able to love him when nobody else ever could, and that was something Jason could not allow. The majority of the teens were easily eliminated, and with each death his confidence grew - and he had felt deeply satisfied by his discovery that the snares he had set for game indeed worked equally well for human prey, just as he had hoped that they might. But then, the fair-haired, freckle-faced girl called Ginny found his cabin, found his mother’s shrine, and damned, demoniac  _ thing _ that she was, she stole Mommy’s sweater, tainted it by touching it, by putting it onto her impure slut’s body, and then she had tried to trick him by pretending to  _ be  _ Mommy. The thought, the desperate  _ hope _ , that his mother somehow actually had returned to him from death after so many cold years of aching with longing to be held in the warmth of her arms again, to hear her sweet voice telling him that he was more than a deformed monster, to feel cared for and loved again, had blinded him to the truth, nearly allowing the girl to kill him then, and shortly after that cruelty, she had stabbed him with his own machete, with the sacred blade that had spilt the saint’s lifeblood into the ravenous sand upon the shore of his first grave, in what he assumed to be a failed attempt to behead him just as Alice had done to his mother. 

The pain of the realisation that Mommy still was gone, still was dead, and that any hope of feeling loved or accepted was just as dead, had been far more painful than the deep wound in his shoulder that had cracked bone and shredded muscle. For that callous desecration of his most sacred relics, for the sin of having dared to place her profane hands upon all that he had left of his beloved mother, Jason had felt a rage so hot that he feared it might consume him, that it would reduce him to a pile of ashes as grey and empty as he had felt inside since the moment he saw Mommy’s head drop to the blood-hungry sand at the shore of the lake that had swallowed him whole then spat him out into the bleak, grey Hell in which he still was trapped. That fiery rage burned the girl’s name and face indelibly into his soul, and the hatred for her that welled up from within the hollowness inside his desolate heart was overwhelming. He had been able to taste it, bitter and caustic upon his unspeaking tongue, with every breath he took, and the need for vengeance drove him as it never before had, to the point where he had found himself able to ignore the agony of his bloodied left shoulder in order to track her back to the Lodge and make another attempt to bring deadly justice to her. And yet, despite his resolve and determination, much like the Higgins girl, Ginny, too, had escaped the retribution her unspeakably foul, blasphemous acts had earned her, the death she so richly deserved.

And it was in that bitter conflagration that Jason’s ability to hope ever again to feel Mommy’s love was consumed, destroyed. That flaming destruction touched upon all of his emotions with fingers of fire, all of his remaining feelings and hopes and desires except for his hatred and his need for revenge, reducing them to charred, brittle, hollow lumps that time eventually could wear away to nothing.

Although time still had not obliterated them completely, it would. Eventually. For such is the nature of time. And perhaps then, if nobody else ever trespassed upon his land, Jason might know peace.

Severely wounded and fearing that the safety of his cabin had been compromised by its discovery by Ginny who he had been unable to kill due to the severity of the injuries that indescribably cruel witch inflicted upon him, he had hidden Mommy’s head away in a safe place and hidden himself away in the large barn upon the Higgins property, not expecting anyone to go there as the family had not returned in the seasons since his attack upon Chris. It was peaceful and calm in the shadowy building, and he even found some clothing that almost fit his large frame to replace his bloodstained, torn old flannel and overalls - a shirt and pants of a heavy, thick material that probably had been left behind by a workman at some point. As comfortable as he could be outside of the boundary of his forest and so far away from the solidifying, soothing presence of his mother’s sacred remains, he settled in and focused upon recovering from the injuries he had suffered while eradicating the filth that came to Packanack Lodge and intruded upon his solitude. The only thing missing had been food, and he was forced to venture to the little market at the close edge of town to attend to that need. Fearing that the couple there whose home was attached to their business had seen him while he stood outside surveying the property, he killed them prior to scavenging through their inventory for what he believed he needed to survive then swiftly returned to his sanctuary in the barn. Much to his amazement, the wound that probably should have been fatal, from which he had expected it to take weeks for him fully to recover, healed completely in a matter of days, although it left his shoulder deeply scarred - a scar that served as a permanent reminder that he never would feel love or compassion or anything _good_ again as long as he “lived,” a scar the sight of which forever would force him to face and simultaneously allow him to accept that lack, a scar that killed any hope or even _desire_ that he might have had of having such things and buried it in a grave so deep it never could be exhumed and recovered. _That_ was when Jason finally had been forced to consider that he might not be an entirely-normal man any longer, although he had not yet understood just how far removed from humanity he truly was. His brief time alone in the barn also had allowed him the opportunity to observe the structure in depth, noting that it obviously was far more solid than the little cabin he had built out of scraps and trash, and Jason carefully studied its construction and geometry during his stay, learning from it what he could. 

However, the peace which he had found at Higgins Haven was almost pitifully short-lived, and he offered a prayer of gratitude to whatever power allowed him to heal almost completely from his debilitating wounds so impossibly, inhumanly quickly when yet another group of disgusting, irresponsible young people showed up at the property a matter of mere days later. 

A group that included the girl who had gotten away some two years before, Chris Higgins herself, amongst its number.

When he saw  _ her _ exiting the van through a small crack in the barn door, the anticipation of finally finishing what he had started that night beneath the gnarled old oak tree had surged over him with all the force of a hurricane-driven tidal wave. Killing her companions, giving their blood in offering to the cursed land and fulfilling the unwritten, unspoken mandate that drove him, proved to be noticeably easier than when he had sought to eliminate the trespassers from Packanack Lodge, to free their rotting souls from their dissolute young bodies. Perhaps the most satisfying part of the massacre, though, had been finding the hockey mask that the curly-haired, heavyset boy whose throat he slit had brought that proved to be an ideal replacement for the sack he previously had worn to hide his disfigured face which wicked Ginny had taken from him. Over the span of the too-few days he had spent blessedly alone in the barn, he not only had healed: he discovered that he had grown stronger, faster, more impervious to pain. These changes served him well when the Higgins girl fought his unrelenting attacks with even more ferocity than she had demonstrated in the forest that night when he found her asleep beneath the oak - stabbing a knife deep into the muscle of his thigh, knocking him senseless then pushing him out of the hayloft with a rope twisted around his neck to hang him - a fall that should have been fatal, that snapped his neck when the slack ran out, leaving him dangling with his feet half a metre off the ground - and finally burying a hatchet in his skull. It was that final, (briefly) fatal wound that had allowed her to escape paying the blood-price of her carefree violation of the sacred land her frivolity profaned with her every stolen breath yet again.

Awakening in a freezer drawer in the hospital morgue upon recovering from the axe wound that had split his head open remained one of the most disturbing, alarming experiences of his existence - even now, decades later. 

As he made his way back to the abandoned summer camp, Jason had observed several teenagers in and around the lake, and he tracked them down, killing all but two for their trespassing that same night - finding that his strength had increased yet again. He had not even  _ wanted  _ to kill the boy - he was too young, too close to innocent although he was teetering at the razor’s edge of losing that trait, for his presence to violate the sanctity of the land - but Tommy Jarvis had gotten between him and his prey time after time, thwarting his every attempt to exact the blood-payment due from his sister. Tommy’s tenacity and cleverness were sufficient to allow the boy to kill him,  _ truly kill him _ , by thrusting a machete through his eye into his brain and then stabbing him countless times.

Jason never had learnt how long he spent in his grave after that, and neither did he care to find out as that knowledge was irrelevant and useless to him, but when his body was exhumed and some force resurrected him again, the same Tommy Jarvis had been standing there over the open grave, a man grown, telling Jason that several years had passed. The necessity of his presence to enforce the cursed land’s law that the living were unwelcome upon the site of the old camp where he and his mother died was proven beyond any doubt when he returned to his home only to find that it was being reopened by the exact same sort of drunken, drugged, fornicating,  **irresponsible** people who had allowed him to drown so many years before. Just to  _ see _ children there hovering upon the precipice of the eternal black void, at the edge of the bottomless lake that had taken his life, had made Jason’s soul ache, sickening him to his core. Unable to allow the desecration or the risk to fragile, innocent children like he had been when he fell victim to the selfsame careless negligence, he slaughtered every one of them as well as the police officers who came trying to save them from the consequences of their sins - except for one blonde girl and Tommy Jarvis. Again, the latter had stood in the way of Jason fulfilling his duty, eventually succeeding in chaining him to a rock that sank to the bottom of the lake, stopping him only one night after his resurrection.

Many years passed while Jason floated there, suspended in the water, trapped by the chain and the stone, unmoving and undying, so close to the peace Fate seemed so determined to deny him, but eventually a little blonde slip of a girl named Tina Shepard who wielded a truly terrible power somehow utilised it to awaken him from the hibernation-like state in which he had existed and break the chain tethering him to the stone - although he did not know how this happened or possess any curiosity regarding that - thereby freeing him to resume exterminating the human vermin who trespassed where they could not be allowed to walk. However, despite the girl’s seeming fragility, the invisible force that she possessed turned  _ anything  _ into a weapon that she did not shy away from using against him, rendering her the most formidable person he had ever encountered. At the end of the evening of his first day of freedom, she had dredged another long-dead body from the lake that had bound his burnt and battered form in chains again and dragged him back down into the depths of Crystal Lake to wait. But again, as always, he had been dragged back to fulfill his duty.

Thus, the time between his startling discovery of his inhumanity - that he was no ordinary, mortal man and that therefore his body was not a slave to the needs of Man - while healing in the Higgins’ barn and his final return from the water in which Tina had entombed him had been only a matter of days. It had not been nearly enough time for him to utilise his newfound freedom from the time-devouring necessity of tending to the requirements of sustaining and maintaining a living body in harsh conditions. However, since last he was dredged forth from Crystal Lake by the peculiar bearded man in strange robes, however many years that was after the Shepard girl had condemned him once again to the depths, he had at last had ample time for such tasks as designing and building ever-improving traps, amassing and tending to a growing hoard of weapons, creating his system of alarms to alert him to the presence of intruders, and maintaining the little cottage in which he and Mommy had lived together prior to Fate’s cruel intervention into their lives.

Jason preferred order, organisation. Not neatness, per se - Nature is not neat by any means, and it was She that he tried to emulate - but there was a part of his unconscious mind that recognised the patterns within Chaos, the strange ways in which even disparate things came together, the order of its very disorder, the illogical logic underlying it all. Out in the wild, everything followed these patterns. The seasons changed, one blending into the next, the new, pale green leaves of spring unfurling upon branches denuded by Winter inevitably darkened, grew broad and heavy during Summer before changing to clothe the forest in all the shades of a great blazing bonfire at the touch of Autumn as if they had stored all of Summer’s heat within their delicate lacework of veins until the conflagration no longer could be contained and it exploded outward in a rush of multicoloured flame that burned them, crisping and curling their edges in anticipation of Winter, when the last of them finally would turn brown and fall dead to the earth to be consumed by the soil. The migratory beasts came and went, all in their time.

The only beasts that failed to fall within the patterns Nature set forth were the humans. Yes, they obeyed the seasons to some extent, predictably coming to the lake to explore and laugh and desecrate that sacred place in Summer, venturing out to hunt game in Spring and Fall, but there was no real order to it or to them that Jason could perceive. Instead, they attempted to impose a sort of order of their own upon it, one that was unnatural and  _ wrong _ .

Everything in Jason’s existence followed a sort of order, an inherent logic where purpose was all and form was irrelevant except for use as a disguise - and perhaps his disdain for form and his favouring of functionality above all was born from his loathing of the appearance of his own form, most particularly of his face, a visage that had cursed his small, insular family to misery and premature death, but that comparison never crossed his mind. Even the state of his home matched his sense of order. The exterior of the cottage where he once had lived in relative peace with his mother implied long years of abandonment, mildew staining what little remained of the peeling paint, vines growing thic and wild between the warped slats of cheap, decaying wooden siding, and a roof that sagged with exhaustion like a weary old derelict at the end of a hot summer day, but the walls beneath it were solid, and whenever a new leak appeared in the roof, Jason repaired it before the house’s bones could be compromised, replacing the rotting shingles with what he could find, filling in whatever holes he encountered. The interior of the cottage looked no better than the exterior - he left the windows open to allow the wind to blow dirt and falling leaves inside to cover the unpolished, scuffed floor, the long-unused kitchen appliances (which had been far from new even when Pamela Voorhees purchased them in 1952) were slowly being eaten by rust, the particleboard beneath the chipped and peeling linoleum of the cabinets and countertop warped more and more with the changing of the seasons, and very little furniture remained in the main rooms. However, the condition of the house was fully intentional upon Jason’s part. It was not that he  _ wanted _ to live in such a dreary ruin - rather, it was part of his disguise. Nobody who saw the decaying structure that appeared to be slowly being consumed by the surrounding forest would believe it could be inhabited, and even if some foolishly curious explorer dared to enter his sanctuary, they would not be disabused of that belief by what they found inside. It was one more layer of protection against intrusion.

However, despite the apparent chaos and decay, Jason’s home was organised in a manner that worked for him. The piles of seemingly random, broken junk hid many of the objects he used to maintain the property, including salvaged parts for the generators that ran the lights for the camp and lining the old mining tunnels that he had discovered ran belowground and which he painstakingly had expanded using nothing but handheld tools and his immense strength, spools of cord, rope, and wire of various gauges and metals, as well as scraps that he used for building traps, and an immense collection of tools that he had stolen or found among the possessions of the dead over the decades. Far more similar items were stored in the mines beneath the camp, including a vast quantity of camping and hunting gear as well as the weapons he amassed. The tunnels closest to the cottage resembled a pack-rat's lair, but Jason knew what lay in each pile. In a sense, he was a hoarder, but he possessed both the skills and the motivation necessary to make use of what he found and kept - and if it seemed to be comprised of enough materials for more projects than a man ever possibly could complete in a lifetime? Experience would have convinced him that his existence was likely to continue long past any human’s lifespan, had he given the matter any thought.

His disorganised system of organisation and the automatic, almost thoughtless precision through which he created a sort of order amidst the disorder of his environment - order not imposed or coerced  _ upon _ but rather learnt  _ from _ Nature - also was reflected in how his mind itself worked. Jason automatically placed all that he encountered into the categories by which he defined things - natural or unnatural, possibly-dangerous or likely-harmless, interesting or not, adult or child, useful, potentially useful, or useless … and trespasser/prey. The fluent ease with which he was able to do so and the regularity of the patterns his existence followed allowed him to function without requiring him to engage in much deep thought; and, more importantly, without having to rely upon conscious memory. Only infrequently did he come across anything which did not fit neatly into any single one or two of these “boxes” by which he categorised things, but upon those exceedingly rare occasions when he did, his frustration tended to grow into something akin to its own entity, existing within him yet separate, and threatening to take control of him entirely. Or, he would find himself being pulled down into and subsumed by the chthonic whirlpool of his darkest memories. Neither was a comfortable position. 

The way he viewed things, the automatic categorisation of objects and experiences, formed a part of his formidable defences against feeling as he had felt prior to his first death and right after his mother was killed. Time and repetition whittled away his ability to feel, both emotionally and physically, and knowing that fear, pain, and even the pervasive loneliness that had defined his childhood no longer possessed the ability to harm him, gave him strength. Even the cruel words which others had wielded against him like weapons had lost their power to stab into his heart long ago. If not for the acidic rage bubbling up inside of him at the discovery that people had dared to reopen the camp, that they had brought  _ innocent children  _ to the place where he had died due to the selfishness and irresponsibility of those to whom his safety had been entrusted and that those charged with supervising the young campers were no different from the counsellors who had allowed him to drown some thirty years prior, Jason probably would not have responded at all to the Jarvis boy’s taunts of “asshole” and “maggot-head.” Despite the fact that he understood their meaning, the words themselves had meant nothing to Jason, and neither had Tommy’s jeering tone, even though there had been a time when hearing them would have reduced Jason to tears - that time was long in the past, though, and all that had mattered to him by the time he arose from the grave was avenging the trespasses, giving the sin-tainted blood of those who intruded upon his property back to the land their presence soiled. The only emotions Jason had experienced then, as now, were anger and frustration, and that anger was not even upon his own behalf.

The simple, repetitive physical tasks with which he occupied his time had a similar effect upon what remained of his emotions. However, given the frustration born from his confusion about the girl-woman-child who he was unable to categorise and his inability to deal with that frustration using any of the skills which he had developed over his existence, his ordinary relative calm had shattered and he felt as if he were a tree infested with termites that swarmed beneath its bark but which it lacked any ability to shake out of itself. At least the rain and his long walk back from the cemetery to where the waters of his first grave - his  _ true _ grave - lapped at the shore of his home had been sufficient for his body to shed the maggots and worms that had burrowed into his corpse while he lay dead and rotting in his coffin, so that odd, almost ticklish sensation had not lasted for too long. But as physical as his confusion and frustration felt to him, how close to actually being jittery it brought him, pacing back and forth across the worn floorboards of Mommy’s cabin was providing him no relief. But Jason was, in his way, a logical and even rational creature; therefore, as pacing did not help, he gathered up his blade-cleaning supplies and sat down cross-legged upon the floor with his spine flat against the wall. The familiar metallic rasp of the whetstone down the edge of the machete sang in his ears, his hands moving from muscle memory alone, angling the stone and the tool with unthinking expertise. 

This was not the machete that had taken his mother’s life - he had lost that particular blade to some victim who fought back, far too long ago for him to remember the details of how it had been taken from him - and several had passed through his hands in the years that followed. Even so, he treated the blade with the same reverence as if it were that sacred instrument that was one of the very last objects Mommy touched with her soft, living, loving hands. Each machete was  _ The Machete _ to Jason, despite his knowledge that they were not the one whose handle had felt the warmth of the same hands that had granted him the only affection he ever had known, that they were not the one upon whose blade Mommy’s blood had poured. It was the shape of it that held meaning to him, what it represented, as opposed to an individual’s blade’s provenance.

Perhaps this merely was yet another of Jason’s defences against the consuming anguish that he had felt, this imbuing of whatever machete he currently possessed with all of the significance and power of the first he ever held. The last his mother ever held. He could gaze down the blade and  _ see  _ her holding it, see Mommy standing upright and alive in her warm sweater, so beautiful there upon the beach as she swung it at that horrible, horrible girl. She was an angel there, a protector of innocence against the immorality of those who came to Camp Crystal Lake, against the irresponsibility that had cost him his life far too soon and which inevitably would have ended in other mothers having to share her pain, in other children dying before their purposes could be known much less fulfilled, swinging it at Alice in the name of vengeance, with the power of her love for  _ him _ .

After a few minutes, he tested the machete’s edge against the pad of his thumb, barely touching it to his dead flesh, and sharp steel parted greyed skin to release a thin, sluggish trail of dark blood that trickled down toward his wrist at the slight pressure he exerted. 

_ Good. But not perfect.  _

By the time he set the stone to the blade again, the wound had closed, leaving the faintest trace of a pale scar upon his the callus of his fingertip, one of hundreds or perhaps even thousands such marks upon that thumb and therefore unnoticeable. Jason worked methodically, slowly and carefully sharpening the blade, holding it up to his masked face and looking down its edge or testing it upon his own flesh every few minutes, seeking perfection. And then, when he finally felt satisfied with his work with the whetstone, he poured a bit of oil stolen from a home near the edge of the property that was his by right of blood into a rag and cleaned it thoroughly before setting it aside to dry.

The next blade he picked up was a hunter’s gutting knife, relatively recently acquired and as yet unused by its new owner, although it was far from new, the wood of the handle stained and worn smooth by hands other than Jason’s. While he had possessed a similar blade during the long ago time when he still had thought of himself as a person who therefore had the same needs as all other living people, and he was familiar with the use of the curved hook at the tip of the blade, he never had used one upon his human prey. Not yet. But the evisceration of the boy hanging by one ankle from a snare had reminded him of this particular knife, and it inspired him to add it to the number he carried upon his body. However, before he could trust it, he had to test it, and therefore it received the same careful treatment as the machete.

Indeed, Jason treated all of his blades with the same degree of care, although none but the machete had any meaning to him beyond their utility. That last night, his mother had worn a large Bowie knife upon her belt, as well, but somehow, these did not hold the same significance to him. He had not ever wasted his time wondering why this might be, likely because such thoughts would have had to come back around to the fact that it had been her machete, wielded by that demon-girl, that killed his mother. And even though killing with the same instrument that had ripped everything good in his existence from his pathetically reaching, helpless hands was, in a way, a reclamation of power, Jason’s mind did not contain the philosophical bent necessary for him to draw such conclusions. Thus, to think too deeply thereupon would cause him to feel the aching sorrow and loss that he tried to the best of his ability to avoid. 

His blades served his purpose, just as he served the land’s and his mother’s, and he tried to be like them. Strong. Sharp. Durable and unbreakable.  _ Deadly _ . 

But there was a difference between himself and them, one which he felt acutely at times - they were unthinking, unfeeling things. Mere objects with no purpose of their own. Jason did not know  _ what  _ he was, but he could not become as like his tools as he aspired to be. He thought. He felt. And no matter how he wished, no matter how much time passed or how vast the chasm between him and the mortal human boy he once had been grew, that remained unchanging.

By the time the storm’s rage began to calm and the pounding of the rain subsided to a whispering patter upon the shingles, nearly a dozen blades of varying sizes and shapes sat upon the floor beside Jason’s bent knee, gleaming with oil and all sharp enough to rend flesh and split bone with ease. Their owner’s frayed sleeves were stained with droplets of his own blood, split to make sure of this, but his scarred fingers did not ache, either from the painstaking work he had spent hours performing or from the nigh upon a dozen new slim cuts that adorned them, every one already healed. The slight sense of accomplishment that he now felt was as nothing compared with what he felt when he finished fulfilling his duty by ending the life of a trespasser and his mother’s insistent commands to kill fell silent inside his head once more, but even so, it was a soothing balm upon his tattered nerves.

Standing once more, his muscles moving to raise his bulk with perfect fluidity despite the hours spent seated hunched over his tools upon the floor, he stooped to retrieve his machete and slid it into the leather straps wrapped around his thigh then picked up the bottle of oil which he returned to its proper place in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, leaving the rest of the collection of weapons to dry upon the floor. Raising his wrists to his masked face, he inhaled deeply, and the trace of copper that wafted into his open nasal cavities was too faint to concern him, so washing his hands and cuffs was unnecessary. Long ago, Jason had noticed that the scent of his own blood was not as strong as that of his victims - just another of the many peculiarities of his being that he was aware existed but upon which he wasted no consideration, merely accepting it, like all of them, as fact. Understanding the changes that his body had undergone served no purpose. Knowing why or how or even what would not make him more efficient, more effective in fulfilling the duty that drove him.

It was not his duty that drove him to leave the cabin, though. The bells had not rung, the clamorous sounds of unwelcome intruders had not reached his ears, and the strange sense that was not truly a sense at all, at least not one of the five which all men possess, had not informed him that anything upon the land that he guarded and served was amiss. And yet, now that the rain had all but stopped, Jason abandoned the candlelit house for the night-black forest. It was not the call of potentially rain-ravaged traps that he followed, leading him to stride, wraith-like, beneath the dripping trees. Neither was it curiosity, nor anything else for which he had a name. The cold wind left behind in the storm’s wake crept into the multitude of holes and tears in his ripped clothing to slither over the dead flesh beneath, dipping in between pale, bare bones exposed within the gaps, but while he could feel its touch, he did not shiver at Autumn’s chilling caress. Truly, he was not even thinking about a destination, merely allowing his boots to follow the traces of the unmarked trail, until the forest opened up before him like a locket unclasped. 

_ That clearing. _

There he stopped, just before the edge of the clearing where the shadows of the trees were thick enough to conceal him from any watchers. But tonight, there was no odd little girl-woman-child sitting beside the little campfire that lit her red-gold hair, transforming it into a halo of flames. Indeed, there was no fire at all beside which she could have sat, and even from several metres away he could see the reflection of pallid stars off the dark water that had puddled in the very heart of the fire pit. One glance at the pile of sticks she had gathered confirmed that they had been left out uncovered during the storm.

_ There would be no fire to warm her, not tonight. _

Still, even though he did not see her, he knew that she was there, no doubt huddled amongst her blankets beneath the sagging tarp that he well knew would have been insufficient protection against the driving rain, cold and wet and miserable. Even though the sight of him had not been enough to drive her away, perhaps a night spent damp and shivering would drive her to untie the stretched ropes supporting her bright blue shelter and pack all of her gear and herself into the tiny, rust-pocked car and leave. He hoped that it was. Standing perfectly still as stray droplets dripped from the flame-coloured leaves above onto his shoulders and head, a few even daring to trickle beneath his mask to touch his despised face, his single, greenish-hazel eye unblinking, he watched, and he listened.

As the quiet patter of errant raindrops falling from the trees grew more and more irregular, the songs of night insects replaced them, and the sound of great wings beating the air above drew his gaze upward, but only momentarily. His head turned sharply back toward the tarp when he heard the distinctive crinkling of plasticised fabric followed by a very odd, high-pitched little squeak then a despondent mutter of “oh, hellfuck.” It took him over thirty heartbeats to realise what that sound was - he had just heard her sneeze. Behind the mask, what remained of his lips curled up into a satisfied smile. There was no actual cruelty in his thought once he recognised the sound, no true malice despite how cold a thought it was. There was only relief.

_ The girl-woman-child …  _ whatever _ she is … she won’t stay here past the morning, not if she spends the night in misery, and especially not if she falls ill as a result. _

Jason remained where he stood, just another part of the forest, unmoving as the trees in whose shadow his large form was concealed except for the steady, slow rise and fall of his chest, silent as the stones surrounding the flooded fire pit except for the barely audible whisper of his breath through the holes in the hockey mask that concealed his face, a neither truly living nor truly dead sculpture, a monument to the true power Nature holds over Man carved of the decayed flesh of a lost but never forgotten child all grown up. Until an hour before the first blush of sunrise warmed the tree-obscured horizon, he simply listened to the rustling of the tarp beneath her restless, shivering body, and then he turned away. He had left the tools and other supplies that he might require to repair any of his traps that had been damaged by the earlier deluge back at the cabin, and he had to retrieve them if he wished to begin attending to that task at dawn. As he walked away, he did not bother to glance behind toward the clearing with its desolate little occupant.

_ By the time he made it back there after circling his property and repairing any damage wrought by the storm, she would be gone, and everything would be simple to place into the proper boxes for categorisation once more. _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
